Ten Percent Worth Dying For
by SeijioArakawa
Summary: ON ICE - Tencho finally sells Konata a DVD! But then Konata gets hit by a bus. Eventually, she gets better. In the meantime, things take a turn for the weird. Learn why Konata really is Legendary Girl A, and why Japanese people have such colorful hair.
1. Legendary Girl A gets hit by a bus

**Ten Percent Worth Dying For Season 1:** This Universe is Experiencing Technical Difficulties

**Chapter 1, **in which Legendary Girl A gets hit by a bus

Standard Disclaimer: fanfiction consists of derivative works written by fans who wish to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them! Please support the creators of the original works referenced in this fanfic, particularly Lucky Star.

It was on a bright, clear morning in late February that Izumi Konata got hit by a bus.

She had walked into the Animate Ikebukuro shop that morning to do some browsing, more as a way to stay in the habit than to look for something specific. Well, she could acquire the necessary third copy of that obscure Haruhi manga, but with her allowance being finite purchases had to be prioritized. Get the first copy as soon as it comes out, the second after a time limit of about a month, and the third "my house burned down" copy – to be stashed securely offsite in Dad's rented storage locker – whenever there was a lull in new releases to spend money on.

Konata's visits traced a surprisingly wide circuit across the greater Tokyo area, checking frequently for spur-of-the-moment deals that might not have been advertised over the Internet. A capacious mind was occupied with anything but schoolwork: scheduling the journeys, finding bizarre loopholes in Tokyo transport regulations that let her save thousands of yen a year on train tickets, allocating her allowance a million hypothetical ways among possible acquisitions, sometimes wheedling on-the-spot discounts out of clerks, and finally consuming the obtained material in many-night marathons of gaming, watching, reading. And she still found time to hang out with her friends, wasting hours and hours of _their _time on inane conversations about food, the weather, and the finer points of moe.

All that and a couple of other things were what made her 'Legendary Girl A', famous, and even somewhat sought after as a customer by bored storekeepers and greasy-faced producers of doujins. The staff of this particular Animate, though, had a couple of additional facts on her that were _not _public knowledge. Facts that explained why they were so particularly desperate to sell something to her. Most days, they had terrible luck doing this. (Being so close to downtown, the Ikebukuro location was fun to visit, but low on Konata's list of likely places to get good deals.) But on this particular day...

On this particular day, Konata was spotted by a brown-haired assistant named Giro. He matched the entering girl to the description he'd been given: long-haired blunette with ahoge. Short, looks about twelve years old (despite being in her upper year of high school already, the mission briefing had noted). Perpetual sleepy-satisfied catlike expression on her face. It was her!

"Aoi-Tencho-sama! Legendary Girl A... has arrived once more!" he announced breathlessly in the back room of the store. Giro's boss "Aoi-Tencho", or the Green Shift Manager, was considered by those who knew him to be a pretty intense guy.

"WHAT!" he screamed, as though being struck by lightning. He collected his wits soon enough though. Once again, it would be the test of a lifetime for him. "Now listen carefully, everyone! She may have shaken us off last time... but today! We must absolutely make sure that she reaches the goal known as our **cash register**, do you hear me?"

The staff cheered their leader wildly, and went through a quick Employee Morale Ritual. It involved pumping their fists and screaming like maniacs, and it put them in the correct mood to perform their assigned roles with efficiency and precision.

For Green Shift Manager could inspire his staff like no one else could. Most certainly it would be the infamous Green Shift Manager (and not his stupid rival, the Red Shift Manager) who would successfully sell Legendary Girl A an _item_ from his store. Any sort of item would do. But moreover! Green Shift Manager would use his sleight of hand to surreptitiously enclose within this item a certain artifact. Created by a staff of trained writers over countless grueling months of analysis of otaku fads, both inane and not-so-inane:

_**The Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction.**_

Legendary Girl A would find this Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction enclosed with her purchase when she got home. She would read it. She would be mildly amused at it. And as a result, all would be right with the world. Maybe Green Shift Manager might even get a raise afterwards for doing such a good job.

Well, he could dream, couldn't he?

"She seems to be at a loss." Giro noted to the Manager as they peered at the girl from behind a rack of recent manga editions.

"Then..." Green Shift Manager permitted himself a chuckle. ".. let us help her find her way."

Tencho went into the back room while Giro snuck through a parallel aisle until he was adjacent to Konata.

"Tencho," he said into his walkie-talkie. "Attempting to determine Legendary Girl A's objective for the day."

"Good." answered Tencho. "What's the newest comic out?" he asked his blonde assistant. What was her name again? Gero, or something? He cursed the fact that, for some obscure security reason, the boss insisted on replacing his entire staff every two weeks.

Gero (or whatever she was called) did some lightning-fast research. "Volume 14 of Sgt. Frog, sah!"

"Excellent!" shouted Tencho. They had it in stock already. "Raise the height of the goods to the appropriate height for Legendary Girl A, and deploy the flyers!"

"Tama! Tama!" shouted a third assistant for unknown reasons, as she began to rearrange the shelves faster (and more neatly) than a tornado ever could.

In the aisles, Konata paused in confusion. Did something just move past... wait. Were these Sgt. Frog comics on the shelf a second ago?

* * *

><p>"Manager!" shouted Giro into his walkie-talkie in panic. "Her objective was not the comics section!"<p>

"WHAT!" shouted Tencho. All that work had been for nothing?

"Tencho, sir!" came the response. "Switch target to the DVD section."

"Understood. Thank you, uh..." he tried to remember the clerk's name "... Giro."

The other assistants were in the back room waiting for their orders.

"Just to be sure." Tencho told them. "Block all side paths so that Legendary Girl A will be forced to proceed directly to the new releases."

Konata was startled to find that two female clerks were in her way with boxes.

"Gero-gero-gero-gero buildup!" one yelled, having first apologized profusely for blocking Konata's escape.

"Tama-tama-tama-tama buildup!" the other echoed.

"Okay..." said Konata and indeed found herself with no choice but to proceed to the new release shelf.

Hmm, here was a promising title. She picked it up, wondering why it suddenly felt like she was doing something momentous, as though she were Howard Carter opening up Tut's tomb for the first time in thousands of years.

Taking his position behind the cash register, Green Shift Manager nearly gave an excited laugh, but stopped himself in time. I've finally become a winner today!

"Comrades!" he whispered into the walkie-talkie. "Let us certainly have a wild celebration tonight!"

"Yes sah!" everyone responded enthusiastically.

The Green Shift Manager suddenly found his focus slipping as a weird fantasy played itself in his mind of lying on a beach with beautiful girls who were expressing great interest in his anime collection...

Ennh, thought Konata. On the other hand, I can always buy this DVD when the price goes down. She put it down on the shelf.

"It was a feint!" Giro screamed into his headset.

"NOOO!" yelled the Tencho as he saw Legendary Girl A turn to exit the shop entirely. Was he doomed to lose another several weeks waiting for her to show up again? (Not to mention that in an unusual stroke of workplace sadism, his boss had wired the displays to explode whenever they failed to sell something to Legendary Girl A, a punishment that meant they'd have to spend _hours_ reshelving the resulting mess.)

Before exiting the doors, Konata paused momentarily before the "bin of shame" as the employees had labelled it, where particularly stupid things the store wanted to get rid of were dumped, to be purchased by severely deranged people at bargain-basement prices. (The price by weight was _on average_ slightly higher than that of raw sewage.) She suppressed a mild and easily-suppressed urge to sort through it and satisfy a morbid sense of curiosity.

Suddenly, Green Shift Manager could see his ending. It was silly, but workable. He'd have to use his ultimate trump card for it. It had been installed as a last resort to be used only after all other last resorts had failed. He had been warned that using it repeatedly would lead to inevitable character derailment, particularly for a person of his temperament. But... this nightmare had to end today! He, the infamous Green Shift Manager, would personally deliver to Izumi Konata the Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction, and with his own two hands bring about the creation of a brave new world, a world where, where...

... he would continue to have a pretty spiffy time running a store, he supposed.

He smiled grimly, wiped some stray drool from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, adjusted his cap, looked Konata directly in the eye...

Konata wondered why the clerk behind the counter, who looked sort of like Ash Ketchum cosplayed by way of Yu-Gi-Oh by a man far too old for the role, was staring at her. No, scratch that, there was probably a far more interesting reference she could make at this point as she stared back at the clerk...

... and he activated the full hypnotic power of his Code Geass parody. Hey, maybe she could make a reference that incorporated Code Geass somehow! Konata decided before all coherent thought vanished from her brain.

"Now then," his voice filled the room, overwhelming the young girl's will immediately. "You shall bring a _**super-rare, bargain, out-of-print DVD**_ out of that bin to me and purchase it." he emphasized the nature of the item carefully so that she'd be tempted to fork over the cash. Hopefully Geassed people didn't pick up on sarcasm. "And you will not notice or question my actions when I rip the DVD case open and insert a small book that will, trust me, blow your mind when you get home." That would probably do it.

As a bonus, the 'blow your mind' comment would force the girl to actually enjoy Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction. That had definitely not been a concern of its creators, but Green Shift Manager felt it his duty as a salesman to ensure the enjoyment of all his customers.

Even if in this case, he had been forced to use such underhanded tactics.

"Manager. She is picking up the item." confirmed Giro.

"Okay. Keep going." Tencho licked his lips. "Oooh, what a beautiful scene! The invisible crowd within me is cheering with wild applause at this very moment!"

"We did it!" cheered the female clerks, pumping their fists in the air.

Konata grabbed an item at random from the bin, without even looking at it.

It turned out to be a DVD re-release of an incompetent English VHS dub of a famous eighties cinematic anime. Very limited print run: only one copy. It was rumored that a disturbed otaku had meticulously faked it just to annoy a certain famous anime director. The director had been not merely annoyed but also horrified, and had expressed his horror by throwing the DVD case into the ocean while on vacation in the coastal village of Tomonoura, where it had been immediately recovered from the bottom of the bay by a garbage dredging barge.

Miraculously, it was saved intact from the landfill by a garbage worker oblivious to its true nature, who gave it to an otaku running a local anime store, who was suitably horrified (but could not bring himself to destroy the thing, due to its rarity) and palmed it off to another otaku as quickly as he could, and from there it had been handed off from otaku to otaku like a hot potato, spreading horror and misery and doing time in various remainder bins across the country. Now it had ended up in the remainder bin of Animate's Ikebukuro store, where Konata had picked it up and was now proposing to buy it.

The employees threw up a little in their mouths when they saw the title. Green Shift Manager was worried. He hoped to God his wording had been sufficiently precise. Had he doomed the poor girl to actually enjoy this... truly bottom of the barrel DVD release?

There was another slight problem: due simply to the item's rarity, it was the most expensive thing to be had in the entire Bin of Shame...

"That will be 1,785 yen." Tencho announced, having scanned the thing, opened the case, and added the item that had been his _real _reason to sell something to Konata in the first place.

Konata emptied the bills from her wallet, and began wordlessly to dig in the corners for loose change.

... it turned out Konata hadn't come prepared that day. All that advanced train journey scheduling, and yet she hadn't bothered to bring a fresh wad of bills? Well, Konata did things like that sometimes.

Konata started to put her change into the tray one coin at a time. The tension in the air could be cut with a knife.

She was down to one-yen coins, clinking down into the change tray. Almost there, Legendary Girl A! Don't let us down now!

The other employees forgot to put up even the slightest pretence of a cover, and had their noses pressed up against the change tray, crowding Konata from all sides. Tencho would have made a note to tell them off later, had he not also been preoccupied with the scene before him.

Konata rummaged in the corners of her wallet one last time and came up with nothing.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Three yen short." she noted. Tencho could see it. In just a second she would grab the money back and leave. All that advanced preparation for nothing. Could he ever look his subordinates in the eye again?

The infamous Green Shift Manager sweated. This was going to require some of the quickest thinking he'd ever done in his entire life!

"TAKEAPENNYLEAVEAPENNY!" he shouted in Engrish, knocking Konata's hand out of the way and throwing down three yen from his own wallet.

"Waugh!" Konata took a step back. "Hey, you scared me! What is this 'take-a-penny leave-a-penny' thing?"

"It's, uh, huhh, just what we do here!" Tencho offered lamely. "Since you're such a valued customer we can surely discount three yen on this here purchase.."

"Why do you consider me a valued customer if I've never bought anything from your store?" Konata wondered, tilting her head to one side.

The scope of the Geass was probably running out. In a moment she'd probably notice what exactly she was buying and refuse. If she had only left the store by then, he could then answer any subsequent complaints by stating that items from the Bin of Shame were non-refundable, and really, how could she not want to buy such a _rare_ item for only 1,785 yen?

"Just take the bag and go! Go!" he whispered, waving Konata towards the door before she could react. Good, she was leaving.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he realized the full scope of what he had accomplished. Based on the few hints his boss had deigned to drop about this situation, he had probably just saved the entire concept of objective reality as he knew it. In any case, the cheering crowd within him was giving a standing ovation, and he felt a sense of peace and accomplishment he had not felt in a long time.

* * *

><p>Outside the store, Konata stared at the item she'd bought, puzzled. How had "Warriors of the Wind" ended up on this side of the Pacific? (For that matter, when did it manage to get a DVD release?) She was pretty sure that bringing it into the country was punishable as high treason against the Japanese culture. The cover art was pretty laughable. She opened it to see if the DVD label would be just as laughable. She stared at the title on the surprisingly thick insert booklet:<p>

**Ten Percent Worth Dying For**

_The Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction_

_Being a crossover between the animes Lucky Star, Haruhi Suzumiya, Evangelion, and whatever else the authors thought to throw in at the last minute._

How had _that_ ended up in _there_? Konata thought. Curiouser and curiouser. Moreover, she had not heard of this "Lucky Star" thing, which personally irked her. She worked hard at becoming the queen of otaku. Surely she should have heard of every anime and manga ever written? What if staid, studious lawyer-child _Kagami_ suddenly made a Lucky Star reference one day and Konata didn't catch it? She would never live something like that down.

Something was not right, and Konata was determined to get to the bottom of this. She'd have to cancel her other store visits, drop in on the Hiiragis' an entire three hours earlier than they'd invited her, and put off that evening's gaming session for the sake of an all-nighter spent scouring the Internet. She removed the booklet from the case, giving it a place of honour in her bag instead. She'd have time to read it when she got home.

Konata thought back to the character of her longtime verbal sparring partner, Hiiragi Kagami. Character Type: _tsundere_, more or less. That one was easy. She wondered if it had solely been due to Konata's baleful influence, always keeping her on edge. But no, she seemed to remember Kagami reacting like that to the frankly bizarre antics of Misao as well. People like her were just inevitably drawn to those who could bring out their sarcastic _tsuntsun_ edge. However, being truly _tsundere_ also involved an entire character development arc, including a romantic foil that would eventually crack open the character's spiky shell to reveal a gentle interior world. Konata thought of her constant goading of Kagami as her public service to the world – the tougher and spikier Kagami's _tsuntsun _shell turned out to be, the more soft, gooey and wonderful her _deredere_ inside would end up being for whoever persevered to crack that shell open.

Now if Kagami had a romantic foil, it would have to be someone like, someone like...

Konata was coming up blank on that one for some reason.

So Hiiragi Kagami was only a proto-_tsundere_, then_._ And she was also a good student and dutiful to her friends and family. All of Kagami's behaviour followed inexorably from these three basic principles. But! One year from now they would be graduating high school. One of the three pillars of Kagami's character would be removed forever. University just wasn't the same in terms of automatic character potential.

So what of Kagami's future destiny? Well, in her school studies Kagami was one of those "doctor or lawyer" types. Konata couldn't remember any _tsundere_ doctor characters off the top of her head, so that meant Kagami would have to become a lawyer instead. So far, so good. But lawyers were such ordinary, boring people! It was necessary, no, essential, for Kagami to get bored with lawyering, brilliant as she would be at it. She would get frustrated with the poor quality of the evidence some down-on-his-luck detective always brought to the criminal trials, which allowed horrible criminals to roam free. She would become a detective herself, and show that man how to do the job properly!

Konata stepped back in her imagination and admired the chain of reasoning. So far it led inexorably to an image of Hiiragi Kagami, brilliant _tsundere_ attorney by day, ace detective at night.

It was the most beautiful thing she had ever thought up in her entire life! A shame it would never happen quite that way. If Kagami had only had a dark past filled with things like street-fighting, Konata would declare her eventual development into a _tsundere_ lawyer detective inevitable. Alas, she had an ordinary past filled with things like studying, hanging out with her friends, and nagging Konata about her homework!

Hmm... it was certainly easy to think about your friends' futures so long as you thought of them as the main character in an anime. However, Konata honestly couldn't imagine who would want to watch an anime that had her as a main character. She was just a colourful supporting character, you know? The main character goes to school, or maybe they're a regular at the cosplay cafe, and that Izumi girl is there in the background, always saying something ridiculous or interesting, but never actually advancing the plot. This meant that there was no realistic character arc that Konata could construct for herself. So there was nothing to do but go home from whatever day job she'd end up drifting into and do otaku things every day for the rest of her life.

At this point, Konata also thought back to something Miyuki had mentioned reading on the Internet... what was it called again...

インテンショーン・マニフェステーショーン立場

... "the intention-manifestation viewpoint"? She couldn't remember a single thing about what _that _had meant. Storyboard artist, insert a convenient flashback here if you please!

* * *

><p><em>Today in class, Miyuki inadvertently teaches Konata how to ignore the constraints of objective reality.<em>

"... on the phone trying to figure out the source of the stink in the office for that night job I was telling you about." Miyuki was explaining to Kagami one morning before class. "They're going to come and have a look at it, though."

"Miyuki, onee-chan, good morning!" Tsukasa called as she and Konata rolled into the classroom.

"Oh, you're both cutting it a bit close today." Kagami noted threateningly, pointing at the clock (only a minute left until class started). "Let's see, Tsukasa is off the hook because she had a cold recently, so it's good to sleep in a little each morning..."

Konata was jumping up and down like a small child, waving her arms as though to say 'Oh, pick me! Pick me! Say something nice to me too!'

Kagami frowned evilly as she shifted her gaze to the blunette, "**You**, on the other hand, ..."

"All-night gaming session." Konata stated simply, reverting to her sleepy eyesmile. It seemed the reason she looked perpetually sleepy was because she really was perpetually sleepy.

"Well then." Kagami crossed her arms and leaned back contemplatively. "I'll leave you to flounder and struggle through today's morning period. _Don't_ ask me to lend you my homework afterwards."

"Kuroi-sensei sure is late today, isn't she?" Konata noted innocently to the others as Kagami turned to leave the room.

This made Kagami look over her shoulder with mock puzzlement. Wasn't Kuroi-sensei in the same gaming party with you or something? "Honestly," she said aloud, "you're a bad influence on sensei. This will all end in tears, I just know it. Guess I'll see you guys at lunch." she waved, hurrying to her own class.

"Anyhow," continued Konata. "Miyuki-san, what were you saying about having a part-time job? Guess that means I'm not the only one with employment here..."

"I'm curious too about what kind of job Miyuki-chan would have..." Tsukasa said, putting a finger to her mouth in wonderment.

"Oh, it's nothing much." Miyuki waved at them. "It's just a part-time secretarial position with..."

"MIYUKI-CHAN IS A SECRETARY?" screamed Konata, startling the entire classroom, the classrooms adjacent to it, and the classroom one floor below. (Next door, Kagami buried her face in her hands as her homeroom teacher looked up from his blackboard, wondering at the racket. Meanwhile, poor Shiraishi Minoru had decided to use Kuroi-sensei's absence to make an early start on his lunchbox, and nearly choked at the sudden noise.) Konata went into a sort of catatonic shock state as all sorts of potential moe situations flashed before her eyes. A little drool appeared at the corner of her mouth.

"Which company were you working for, Miyuki-chan?" asked Tsukasa.

"I was just getting to that..." Miyuki continued, deciding to ignore Konata's apoplectic trembling for the moment. "It's a part-time secretarial position with the media distribution group Animate..."

"Wait, Animate?" Konata calmed down a little. "Don't those guys have a truly insane work ethic? How do you survive?" She remembered the generally intense clerks who worked Animate's retail stores, and truly experienced a failure of imagination picturing Miyuki working for people like that.

Miyuki smiled with embarrassment. "Actually, most of my work consists of assisting their, uh... marketing department with field research. When I'm in actually in the office there's very little for me to do. I generally practice my English skills with recreational web surfing..." she trailed off guiltily.

"Wow, Miyuki is studying things even when she's wasting time!" Tsukasa exclaimed in admiration. Miyuki became quite flustered at this.

"Yeah, most office workers generally just play Minesweeper or waste their time on forums! I know because I talk to some of them on the forums!" Konata added.

"Actually, Konata-san, I think during my Web surfing I read an article by an American by the name of Steve Pavlina which you might find interesting." Miyuki smiled, trying to distract everyone from praising her embarassingly. "It deals with an experimental attitude to goal accomplishment..."

"That _is_ interesting. I wish Kagami were here, she'd back me up that I'm a pioneer of experimental attitudes to goal accomplishment! Explain away!"

"The intention.. manifestation viewpoint?" repeated Tsukasa carefully, wondering how long these two words would be if you wrote them side by side in katakana.

"That's right, I didn't _quite_ understand what it was about. But it seems to start from the premise that all of reality is a subjective dream that is seen by the conscious mind. By this logic, the first step to accomplishing any goal is simply visualizing the desired outcome and desiring it to manifest in reality. Only then will the necessary resources appear for someone to take action on an objective level. In principle, Pavlina-san claims, one can actually rewrite the objective aspects of reality from this viewpoint, manifesting infinite possibility, and he says that we only observe a stable reality because very few people actually desire to have an experience in which objective rules are modified. It's not actually possible to prove or disprove whether the method works, however..."

"..." Konata replied. This Miyuki lecture was somewhat more complicated than usual.

"For instance, most people organize their time in such a fashion that they would not be able to both spend as much time on otaku activities as Konata-san, while still being able to interact with her friends as she does. According to Pavlina-san's theory, it's probable that this is due simply to Konata's firm conviction that she has time to do both these things. The fact that Kuroi-sensei" she looked at the clock "is now ten minutes late for class might simply be a coincidence Konata has manifested in order to gain an additional ten minutes of social interaction time!"

Actually, that sort, kind of made sense in a sideways fashion, Konata thought. Hadn't she just spent the entire night gaming with Kuroi-sensei, unintentionally ensuring that their teacher would be completely worn out and thus unable to make it to class on time? Wait, Miyuki was still talking.

"... on the other hand, if Konata were to shift her expectations and simply think of finishing her homework in a realistic manner, she would find herself suddenly gaining the necessary resources to ..."

Homework? Konata experienced an immediate sense of primal fear and grabbed Miyuki's uniform in a supplicatory gesture.

"NO! Miyuki-san, I don't want to be a studious lawyer-child like Kagami is! You'll completely upset our character balance!" she wailed. "Isn't it enough to have two good students among our number already? If you're trying to manifest me or whatever to become _that_ way, just forget it!"

"Ehe." giggled Tsukasa at Konata's sudden movement. She'd sort of spaced out during the lecture and had been listing names of various substances in her head. Balsamic vinegar, hydrogen azide, lime jello... she shook herself to keep from spacing out again.

"Uh... Konata-san.. calm down please." Miyuki reassured her. "Nobody is trying to force you to do homework against your will! It's just an article I read during some idle web surfing that I thought was kind of interesting.. I'm not certain I buy Pavlina-san's logic in any case..."

"Kona-chan seems to be developing an allergic reaction to homework..." Tsukasa laughed. "She wasn't anywhere near so bad about it last year!"

"Wait." Konata let go of Miyuki suddenly. "All in all, I heard something about manifesting infinite possibility with your thoughts... isn't that exactly like in 'The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya'? So, the gist of your lecture was, this Pavlina guy is like one of those Haruhi worshippers, except he thinks that _everyone in the universe is Haruhi_? How does that work? ... I want some of whatever that guy is smoking." she concluded.

"Americans really do have bizarre ways of thinking, don't they?" Miyuki thought aloud.

They were interrupted at this point by Kuroi-sensei sprinting into the room and trying vainly to catch her breath at the front of the class.

"Sensei!" Shiraishi Minoru shouted. "Seeing as you're so very late today, perhaps you could..."

"Bagh! Aaaaaaah..." Kuroi-sensei took a particularly loud breath, shutting him up. Gods, she thought, I was just planning to catch a fifteen-minute nap after that gaming session, but then her alarm clock chose exactly the wrong time to run out of batteries! As vengeance, she resolved to give Konata a particularly hard whack on the noggin when the girl inevitably fell asleep in class today.

* * *

><p>Oh, certainly... so that's what it had been. Miyuki had just made the mistake of assuming that Konata cared to expend brain cells on her homework one way or the other. It just wasn't a worthy cause for Konata. But ensuring that Kagami attained the pinnacle of her character development? Now there was a reasonable thing to use frightening Haruhi-like powers on! There would be tragedy and character derailment, Konata realized, but the resulting story would simply be amazing to behold...<p>

So, Konata decided, she was ready for the necessary conditions for Kagami to become a _tsundere_ lawyer detective to manifest themselves, right about...

Now.

Konata wondered if there was any catch-phrase to shout or something else that Steve Pavlina made you do to access your special manifestation powers. She should have asked Miyuki to forward her a link to that article. Never mind, she was in a good mood already. Full of resolve, she dashed out into the street, from behind a parked van, and right into the path of an oncoming bus that had been speeding a little, trying to catch up to schedule.

The resulting collision threw Konata about ten meters down the street, and she hit the pavement hard. In retrospect, she managed to think before losing consciousness, this was probably a cautionary lesson of sorts about ignoring too much objective reality too quickly.

Watching from inside the store Green Shift Manager was horrified. Legendary Girl A didn't look at all good. First things first, he probably needed to call an ambulance. Then he needed to get in touch with his superiors; they'd have to scramble to come up with a plan B before it was too late. Green Shift Manager struggled with a sudden and unaccustomed wave of black despair. No! He would carry on! One way, or another, he would finish this, for the very safety of this universe depended on it!

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Notes:<strong> I actually saw someone get hit by a speeding car in the exact manner described here once! They weren't as badly hurt as Konata, but being thrown into the air like a ragdoll has got to mess up your day. PSA: Please look both ways when you cross the street, particularly if your view is obstructed!

Except maybe for Miyuki's smelly office (that's a big problem with my current summer job; I generally just go sit outside on a bench and do my work there) everything else in this chapter is, well...

...

Strange. Actually, I don't remember having taken any drugs recently.


	2. familiar faces, strange implications

**Ten Percent Worth Dying For Season 1: **This Universe Is Experiencing Technical Difficulties

**Chapter 2,** in which familiar faces are seen and strange things are implied

Standard Disclaimer: fanfiction consists of derivative works written by fans who wish to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them! Please support the creators of the original works referenced in this fanfic, particularly Lucky Star.

"Onee-chan," Kagami asked tearfully. "You know how I've been occupied with other things recently... I didn't find any time to finish my math homework! So could I borrow and copy yours maybe?"

"Oh, little sister," Tsukasa said gently, looking up from her chemistry worksheet. ".. that's the third time this week! You really are hopeless... but I guess I have no choice."

Kagami smiled sheepishly at her big sister. Not only did Kagami need Tsukasa to help her with homework, but deep down, Tsukasa needed someone like Kagami. Someone who relied on her and let her know she was needed...

"... oh my god!" screamed Tsukasa, closing her eyes and tuning out the unaccustomed situation. "That was so weird and amazing! Like six different kinds of lysergic acid diethylamide mixed together with chocolate syrup! ..." she tried to picture the resulting confection. "... I should probably wake up now before I actually see something like that."

She woke up and found that the dream had made her inordinately cheerful for some reason. Of course Tsukasa was the little sister, a really hopeless airhead who always needed help from her big sister Kagami. And right now, she didn't want it any other way. That's why imagining it the other way around had been so weird! Hmm... diethylamide? What _would_ a diethylamide look like?

Then her cheerful state was punctured as she remembered that Konata was lying comatose in the hospital, and had been that way for a month now. And not only that, Tsukasa was now looking forward to a day of everyone else being glum about it too..

* * *

><p>In the hospital lay Konata's inert body, hooked up to machines and staring emptily into the air. Within her brain, a few thoughts trickled glacially, too dim and too slow to make any impression in her conscious mind. Over the course of a month, she had even managed to formulate a question, and was now waiting for an answer from the rest of the universe:<p>

"Had she made a good decision?"

* * *

><p>Spring had arrived, and with it a new school year, and with it a new spate of transfer students!<p>

Kobayakawa Yutaka adjusted her blazer and picked up a hairbrush as she looked into the mirror on her dresser. She wanted to look presentable the day that she moved to a new home. She examined her orange hair, a fairly recent acquisition. A bit wispy and a bit too dry, she thought, but it still made her look even younger than before and she secretly liked that. Too bad she didn't have a choice – whether or not she wanted orange hair, that was what she had now – and her orange hair was only the most benign symptom of the exposure she'd suffered.

Yui-neesan called from downstairs for her to get in the car already.

Yutaka hurriedly brushed her hair and did up two pigtails. If you didn't look too closely at the hair and didn't pay attention to her behaviour she would have looked about ten... no, perhaps eight years old... anyhow, far too young to be entering her first year of high school.

Narumi Yui, Yutaka's significantly older sister, frowned as she saw that the simple act of hurrying around to the other side of the car and getting in made Yucchan flushed and out of breath. There had been something... weird... in those nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Most people who lived near the Containment Zone ended up fine, but a few were severely affected. Symptoms observed thus far included hair that faded to orange, an extremely weak, sickly constitution, respiratory difficulties, circulatory difficulties, and, it was beginning to become obvious with Yutaka, somewhat stunted development for those who were still young when it happened. Experts both national and international threw up their hands in confusion, as it resembled no previously known instance of mass radiation poisoning, and was entirely uncorrelated to any form of cancer. A few acid-tongued wags called it Project Orange, by analogy to the deliberate coloured-hair projects, although it quickly became taboo to utter this name in a public context.

Still, Yutaka remained cheerful and tried not to think too much about her own probably shortened lifespan. Her positive attitude made things much easier for everyone around her.

"Now remember," Yui reminded her, "be extra polite to your uncle, and remember that he's very worried about Konata right now – don't bring her up unnecessarily. Got that?"

Yutaka nodded.

"... with that out of the way, younger sister of mine," Yui announced in a completely different tone of voice, "today's the start of your new life! Let's hit it off with a bang!"

And without further ado she unleashed her truly fearsome driving skills, much to Yutaka's discomfort.

* * *

><p>"I'm here to report that Yutaka has passed and I'm bringing her and stuff!" Yui announced, waving an arm spastically.<p>

"Oh, well come in then." said Izumi Sojiro over the top of his newspaper.

He looked more or less okay. To tell the truth, he was worried sick about his daughter, but countless years of practiced perversion got him into the habit of not really showing his thoughts.

"I know I'll probably be a lot of trouble from now on..." Yutaka stammered. "But I hope we can get along well!"

"Just feel right at home!" said Sojiro breezily as he noted Yutaka's orange hair, blazer, short but bulky pigtails, and the huge white bows in her hair. It was like she was trying deliberately!

There was a brief pause, after which the doorbell rang.

"Oh," Yui said, "that must be the stuff they're bringing for us! I'll get it!"

Sojiro smiled at Yutaka amiably while considering what to say. It was exactly moments like this that made him wish his beautiful daughter was here... normally Konata would handle the social interaction and he could just admire the scene from afar... but no! Was that really all his daughter was good for? he thought in a sudden surge of anger at himself.

"So... congratulations on passing your exam!"

"I suppose I was really lucky..." Yutaka said. Her face brightened. "And that means I'll get to meet that handkerchief girl again!" she said, more to herself than to Sojiro.

"Oh," this looked and sounded interesting, judging by Yucchan's expression, "could you tell me about who that is?"

In the hallway, a pair of movers began to manoeuvre a large amount of machinery 'and stuff' upstairs, under Yui's sporadic direction. A large portion of it was marked "Iwasaki Laboratories". He knew a nurse would be coming along later to set it up. Well, he thought, Yutaka was certainly lucky to be receiving such top-notch medical attention. He sat back and prepared to drown his worries in a middle school girl's cute tale of her own (hopefully romantic!) worries.

* * *

><p><em>Turning back the clock... to the day of Yutaka's entrance exams.<em>

Yutaka was in the girls' bathroom, just catching her breath in between two exam sessions, when the door opened and someone in a blue and white sailor uniform cut from unusual fabric came in and walked straight towards her.

"Are you all right?" the strange girl asked quietly, her face showing concern and interest.

Yutaka looked around at the speaker and actually blushed a little. Pale, olive hair cut short, angular eyes and a face set in a perpetual slightly awkward expression – all together, these certainly produced a striking effect.

"Do you want me to take you to the nurse's office?"

"No..." Yutaka said. "I think I'll be all right..."

The strange girl blinked. So this was the person her family was helping, this small girl with orange hair, she thought. Looking at her, it certainly seemed like a worthwhile thing to do.

_Immediately after the exams..._

In a happier time when Konata was still walking around and Yutaka's hair was slightly less orange, the two of them and Yui-neesan were sitting in the Izumi household around tea and Pocky, having a conversation.

"... and then we talked for a while, and she even let me borrow her handkerchief! I'm just happy I might be able to make a good friend already."

"But Yutaka," noted Yui, "she might have failed the exams."

"No!" shouted Yutaka desperately. "That's can't happen! People like her always get in!"

"But you know, Yucchan," Konata offered sagely while slurping her tea, "_you _could also be the one who fails."

"That's actually kind of possible!" Yutaka wailed miserably.

"Don't worry, you should be fine."

"Wait, I know!" Yutaka said. "No matter what happens, I can just meet her on the day they announce our results! I have to return the handkerchief to her anyways."

Konata just smirked knowingly and continued slurping down tea.

Realizing the implication, Yutaka dug through her bag, finding a letter which stated simply that "exam results will be returned by mail."

_And then... the day of orientation and uniform fitting..._

At the end of the day, Yutaka was relieved to see a familiar shock of hair in the distance.

"Excuse me!" she ran up to the olive-haired girl.

"Hmm?"

"I'm so glad I ran into you! I've been wanting to return this." she held out the handkerchief with both hands.

"You intended to return this?"

"Yes!"

By unspoken agreement they started walking towards the bus stop.

"I suppose I ended up troubling you by lending it. Given my circumstances at the time, I did not expect to ever see you again and I never intended to have it returned." the tall girl was saying in her quiet voice, almost as though she was perpetually afraid of raising it.

"I was really worried I might fail!" Yutaka confirmed. Had it been that obvious?

"Oh. I see. Of course, that was an issue. But if you're here right now, that means you will be in the same year as I. I'm sorry for making you worry."

"Oh." Yutaka said. It made sense. "You probably just thought I was someone's little sister."

"No, I noted that you were taking the exam while not feeling particularly well. That is why I was concerned about you."

They had arrived at the bus stop.

"I am being picked up by car just a little down the street." the tall girl said. "So this means we'll be parting here. Since we are registered in the same year," she concluded, "we will certainly be seeing each other on occasion."

"Um..." Yutaka called after her. "I hope we can have a great three years together!"

Minami spun around and gave Yutaka a sympathetic and somewhat melancholy look, then raised her hand in acknowledgement before continuing on her way.

"What a relief. I've already made friends with such a nice person in high school." Yutaka thought happily. "... but I still didn't ask what her name was!"

* * *

><p><em>Turning back the clock to the present...<em>

"Well," Sojiro laughed, "it's no big deal! Just make sure you ask her next time!"

"I finally got the guys to move the stuff properly!" Yui announced confidently as she strolled into the room. "Geez," she whispered, "the amateurs they hire these days!"

The two movers paused in the door to the front hall to bow to Sojiro, then scrambled for their truck, feeling anxious to get away.

"So you're all set to sleep in the spare room, Yutaka!" Yui said. "I hope you feel right at home here."

"Thanks, oneesan!" Yutaka smiled.

"Oh, are you feeling all right, Yutaka?" Sojiro asked.

"I just got a little carsick on the way here. I took my medicine beforehand, though, so I'll be all right! I'm sorry that all this stuff worries you so much."

"Yutaka was a bit sickly even before it all happened." Yui noted soberly, rubbing Yutaka's back to comfort her.

"But I'm the only one from my old school who's going to Ryoo..." Yutaka continued. "And I'll probably keep getting sick again... I'm worried if I'll be able to get along with my classmates."

"Don't worry!" Sojiro said. "I'm sure you'll make lots of friends. Just be sure to tell me all about them, all right?"

"Yutaka's a nice girl so she should be fine!" Yui warbled, patting Yutaka on the head.

Yutaka pouted adorably. "Just stop treating me like an eight-year old already!"

* * *

><p>Konata's brain was waiting for an answer from the rest of the universe. The rest of the universe obliged by saying:<p>

"No, what the hell were you thinking? Get over here so I can show you just how stupid you were."

But the rest of the universe hadn't bothered to check its notes to see why inviting Konata over at the moment wasn't a good idea either...

* * *

><p>Walking back from school together (Tsukasa had stayed behind for cleaning duty), Miyuki and Kagami were trying to talk about anything other than Konata's current state.<p>

"So I never got around to asking you in any detail, Miyuki-san," Kagami was saying, "how did you get into a secretarial job anyways? You have to admit it's a bit unusual for a high school student."

"Well, you remember that essay contest a while back..." Miyuki began. "I'd actually realized I wasn't likely to do well at that kind of thing, so I just wrote up this long rambling thing about my friends and what we liked to do in our spare time."

"Oh? I'm curious to see what you wrote, actually."

Miyuki actually reddened a little. "I'm very afraid to show it to anyone! I kind of... decided to make it all snarky and sarcastic. It was fun to write, but in retrospect it was very immature of me to fool around like that. I'm very glad only the top ten entries were being published! Anyhow," she adjusted her glasses and went on quickly before Kagami could say anything, "out of nowhere I received a letter from Animate's market research department, saying they were considering me for an internship based on having privately perused the essay submissions!"

"I was very surprised..." she continued "... they liked _that thing_? But I talked it over with my mother and she agreed that it was an interesting opportunity and so I went for an interview. I was sort of curious to find out what exactly a market research department did, actually, and why they'd be interested in hiring a high school student! So I talked to them, and they seemed like..." she paused as though choosing her words carefully "... nice people, and I got a part-time job, just like that!"

Finishing her story, Miyuki began to look at the scenery, lost in some train of thought.

"Hmm..." Kagami mused "... maybe market research is just one of those silly-sounding fields which few people understand, like derivatives trading or something. So they try to set up these high school internships to get the person interested in the subject, and maybe recommend them to a good university afterwards. I'm not sure what high school essays have to do with market research, though.."

"It certainly seems that way to me," Miyuki confirmed, "although I haven't found it at all intriguing so far. I told you already, mostly they just have me record and file away data that I don't quite understand the purpose of."

"So you're probably not going into market research then, I take it?"

"Probably not. In any case, my contract is going to expire soon and I couldn't get it renewed if I wanted to – there's... some kind of funding reorganization going on, and of course their priority is going to be paying the permanent employees, not an intern they hired out of a high school who barely knows anything. Best to focus on studying for university entrance exams!"

"That's right.." Kagami frowned. "We have exams at the end of this year. I guess I tested into Ryoo High once already, but I'm still not looking forward to going through the experience again. Especially since the stakes are so much higher now – we really only get one chance to test into some of the nicer universities."

"I don't think anyone looks forward to university exams, Kagami-san."

"It is sort of our national obsession, though. I feel bad about being so frightened of it when people generally say I'm a good student..."

They walked on for a while in silence.

"You know, I've been getting a lot of phone calls from cram schools lately about that kind of stuff, it's really a pain." Kagami stated.

"You can generally screen those out if you have number display. Telemarketers often use an anonymous ID, but that makes them easy to tell apart from the usual calls."

"Number display, huh?" Kagami said dubiously. Her house still had a rotary phone.

Returning to her own house, Miyuki found her mother, Takara Yukari, talking on the phone. With her breezy tone of voice and perpetual eyesmile, it was difficult to figure out what her mood actually was, but Miyuki thought she seemed a bit agitated.

"My... is that so?" she was asking. "That must have been very difficult for you... No... it's the same for our family.. right... Well, my daughter's returned... Yes, I will make sure to talk to you later. I'm going to have to tell her now. My condolences. I'm sorry to be taking up your time."

"Who was it?" Miyuki asked. "It sounded like you were having a lively conversation."

Yukari looked at her for a while.

"It's Konata..." she said finally. "She died in the hospital."

Miyuki couldn't think of anything to say. It was true, wasn't it? Miyuki searched her own feelings on the matter. Logically, she should be crying right about now, shouldn't she? This was what she'd been afraid of: that someone close to her would die and she wouldn't have the right feelings about it. In her own family, she'd only lived through the death of one grandfather, whom she'd barely met. Little wonder she'd been the only family member who had difficulty shedding tears about him, which made her feel awkward and ashamed. Shouldn't she be weeping now? Had she really been a good friend to Konata? They'd certainly spent so much time together...

"Do you know what she died of?" her mother continued. "A _spontaneous heart failure_, out of nowhere... could you believe it? That's something that could have happened if she'd been a _hundred_ years old when she'd been hit by that bus, but... just like that? And... the head doctor was apologizing to Sojiro in his office for hours, but at the end he still denied ten times there'd been _anything_ wrong with her life support equipment!"

It was still difficult for Miyuki to tell how mother was feeling about all this. The sense she was getting was that mother was mostly indignant, and... angry? That couldn't be right.

Yukari's eyes snapped wide open with a sudden realization, rendering further speculation about her emotional state unnecessary.

"... _that _... _woman _..." she uttered eventually, venom dripping from her voice. "I'll be right back," she told Miyuki as she rushed from the house.

Miyuki sat down, stunned, and searched through her bag until she took out a small, thick booklet. Hmm... _a crossover between the animes Lucky Star, Suzumiya Haruhi and Evangelion_. Now that Konata was dead, it was never going to serve its intended purpose. Miyuki wasn't particularly eager to read it. As she remembered, "Lucky Star" was merely a stand-in for the worst-case scenario extrapolated by Animate, based on somewhat... personal information that Miyuki had provided to them about her friends. Anizawa-san had been extremely careless to leave it on Konata's person, and lucky that it was Miyuki who discovered it when visiting Konata in the hospital, hiding it in her bag. If, say, Kagami had found it instead, the situation would have become extremely awkward. All sorts of questions would have been raised about why Konata would be carrying around a book that fantasized about the lives of her friends in such detail. She wondered what would be a good place and time to burn this copy without attracting attention.

She realized she was putting off something unpleasant here. She'd have to call her friends and let them know what happened. She picked up her phone and dialled Kagami's house.

"Hello?" Kagami's voice answered on the other end. "Sorry, one second. Tsukasa, can you quiet down a little there?"

Tsukasa could be heard apologizing. She'd been loudly and urgently explaining something to someone else, about how you should not use some brand of scent remover because of all the poisonous chemicals in it.

"Um... Kagami-san..."

If Miyuki had been worrying before about not crying over a friend's death, it turned out that the worries were baseless. Hearing about Konata's death was one thing, but telling someone else was what made it definitive. _Oh, good_. some part of her observed inappropriately as she broke down. _I'm not a cold unfeeling monster after all_.

"Miyuki?" Kagami asked again. The long pause was clearly beginning to worry her, which made things even more difficult.

"I..." Miyuki began, struggling to get the words out. "my... mother just got off the phone... with Sojiro-san... he was saying... Konata.. she's dead! Died in the hospital. I'm... I'm sorry."

She was met with a stunned silence.

"...WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU WEREN'T ANYWHERE NEAR..." – Miyuki was startled to hear her mother shouting out in the street. "I'll... call you later." she managed to sob into her phone and closed it.

Looking out the window, she saw mother across the street, haranguing their neighbour Iwasaki-san.

"FINE THEN." Yukari was saying. "So I guess that's your story and you're sticking to it?"

But they continued arguing for quite some time.

Iwasaki-san looked at the window from which Miyuki had been listening: angular eyes betraying shock, confusion, and remorse. Dark olive hair, about 30 years old. Certainly whatever Yukari was accusing her of, she hadn't done it.

Wasn't Iwasaki-san a person who always helped others? Hadn't she just arranged for the machines for Kobayakawa Yutaka's recovery? Yutaka's parents had asked their relations if they knew anyone who could help, Konata had asked Miyuki, and Miyuki had introduced Iwasaki-san to the Kobayakawa family. Iwasaki-san had been cold and formal with them, but she agreed that Yutaka needed to be moved further away from the Daiichi Containment Area and given extensive medical attention, and she suggested the girl take entrance exams at Ryoo High.

Whatever her mother had against Iwasaki-san, Miyuki, it seemed, wasn't to hear of it.

"Mother, what exactly did..." Miyuki began once Yukari had come back and slumped in an armchair, eyes closed from exhaustion.

"_Don't mind._" Yukari cut her off firmly. "Whatever was I doing, it was just a momentary suspicion anyways." she grabbed a strand of her pink hair and studied it intently. "It was really Project Pink talking, not who I am as a person.. I'll have to come over at some point and apologize now." she still sounded like she found the idea repulsive, though, and as though she had no plans of ever actually doing it. "Don't ever suspect people like I just did.. don't ever be like me, Miyuki, understand?"

"Eh?"

"... and don't ever be like your father either." Yukari remembered to add, leaving Miyuki puzzled and upset. If Konata was gone, and she wasn't to be like her mother, and wasn't to be like her father, and even a lineage in Project Pink was such a burden, what did that leave her to work with?

The phone rang again. Yukari looked at the number display and realized that it was a telemarketer. To let out her feelings, she picked it up, screamed:

"WHATEVER IT IS YOU'RE SELLING I DON'T WANT IT ESPECIALLY NOT NOW!"

... and hung up.

Miyuki tried to think of what Iwasaki-san _could_ have done to make her mother so upset, that had to do with Konata. One thing came to mind, now that Konata was dead, Iwasaki Laboratories had a special project that would have a claim to... no, but it had to be a coincidence! She couldn't have arranged to _kill_ Konata just for the convenience of one of her projects! Iwasaki-san just didn't treat people that way..

Miyuki supposed this was just another thing she'd have to avoid telling her friends about. It was becoming difficult to keep track already.

* * *

><p>Izumi Sojiro had been very insistent and eccentric about Konata's burial arrangements. Display her body for five days before cremation, having first bleached her hair a pure albino white for reasons Sojiro hadn't explained very well. Bury the ashes in the same graveyard that had featured prominently in the film 'Tokyo Godfathers'.<p>

(He'd removed the blue dye from his own hair; there was no longer anyone around for him to colour-coordinate with, and so he became an ordinary-looking black-haired Japanese man again.)

He tried to spend as much time as he could with his girl. Fortunately he had the opportunity to work at home, so he brought a laptop and did his writing at Konata's side.

In the evenings he crept away to check on his house and get a bit of food cooked, but then her friends from school generally came over at that point, so Konata spent very little of the week alone.

The bleaching of her hair did strange things to her expression, Sojiro noted as he looked at her. When she'd been blue-haired, somewhat hyperactive, and rarely properly behaved he found some strange fantasies appearing in his mind, but the white hair and relatively stern and serene expression imparted by the undertaker silenced all those, increasing the girl's resemblance to her mother. That had really been the effect Sojiro had been going for: he wanted to think of her as a daughter first and foremost, not merely another object of what he termed "winning at life."

He was interrupted from his tryst by a small, quiet voice.

"Excuse me, Izumi-san," someone was saying. "I'm here about the agreement. The one you made when you signed up Izumi Konata to enter Ryoo High."

Sojiro stared at the tall girl in school uniform that had appeared before him. Pale olive hair cut quite short, angular eyes, a perpetual awkward expression. Carrying a very large briefcase. She was so androgynous! If not for the skirted uniform, Sojiro would have mistaken her for a very pale, sickly boy. He shuddered at the image, which was not at all agreeable to his tastes.

He then realized that the girl wasn't really in _school uniform_ per se. No school had uniforms like that. The top was made of the same material as a lab coat and had pockets in the same places. The skirt was also made of water-impervious material, pleated, and of a blue color Sojiro now remembered having seen in the hospital. Functionally, it was the outfit of a hospital nurse or doctor. It had been an odd flight of fancy on the part of whoever designed the thing to tailor it in the shape of a girl's sailor uniform.

He remembered now for what purpose Iwasaki Laboratories had actually wanted to sign the agreement. Well, it showed that they really knew their stuff if they were already comfortable sending one of _those things_, alone and unsupervised, to do the operation. Hmm... he'd assumed that they'd forgotten all about doing it. Wouldn't it have made more sense to operate on Konata's body while it was still in the hospital?

He realized that he'd been staring silently at her without saying anything, which was impolite of him.

"I realize you may have been in the middle of something.." she noted in her sad, hollow voice. "I can come back later if you want."

"No, no," Sojiro tried to wave nonchalantly and not picture in detail what they were about to do to his little girl. "That's quite all right, uh.."

"Daiichi Minami." the girl introduced herself, showing him an ID card that indeed confirmed her to be the property of Iwasaki Laboratories. What an odd and creepy name, too, as though they'd deliberately named her after one of those broken nuclear reactors...

"It happens to be a name of ill omen now. An unfortunate coincidence." Daiichi (-san? -chan? Sojiro was not sure how to address her) confirmed in the ensuing awkward pause.

"Well, Daiichi-san.."

"_Minami_." the girl contradicted him. "My last name is neither very descriptive nor pleasant to hear."

"Well, Minami-san. I was told that the procedure must be performed soon after.. biological death and I guess," he sighed, "we may as well get it over with."

Minami nodded and began unpacking her briefcase. "Also, Izumi-san, please accept my condolences." she breathed the words so quietly while arranging her surgical equipment that Sojiro had to strain his ears to pick them up. "And my apologies. This situation is highly irregular. Normally we would not expect the subject to become available until decades after the agreement was formed. We had a long argument over whether the emotional impact to her close ones would make the arrangement unacceptable. However," she fidgeted as though she'd been asking Sojiro out on a dance and couldn't quite find the words, "this is a highly important opportunity to us, that will move our schedule forward many years!"

She looked quite genuinely ashamed to be standing in front of Sojiro like this and demanding his daughter. He remained silent. Was that the beginnings of a _blush_ on the girl's cheeks? Why, oh gods, why?

"If it matters to you.." she added, studying a metal tray with unusual intensity to hide her expression. ".. I was personally against all this, though. However, it does not matter."

"I understand.." Sojiro answered shakily. "Minami-san, you're just doing your job, it was never your decision in the first place." It's not fair, he raged internally, why was _he_ the one who had to comfort the person _they_ sent about something that was so hard on _him_ in the first place?

Minami nodded again and resumed her previous impassive expression. "I am ready to begin the procedure, here and now. The subject will not have to be moved to any other facility. I suggest that you leave this room for the duration." she stated. Was there anything she was forgetting? Oh yes, "do not worry, I have prepared for these working conditions and also studied the requisite literature on undertaking. When I am finished there will be no sign that any procedure was performed. I will meet with you later to take care of some additional paperwork."

Well, that was not very reassuring, thought Sojiro as Minami-san ushered him implacably out the door without even leaving him a chance to respond. He understood that Minami-san would indeed be very skilled, but did they really have to send someone who looked barely old enough to attend high school? He thought back to home, where Yucchan was probably hooked up to some Iwasaki Labs machine or other at that very moment, and wondered whether her health would indeed be safe with these people.

Left alone with the dead girl, Minami sighed. Dealing with other people was always so stressful. It made sense, she thought as she moved the body on top of a sterile sheet of latex, when most of her interaction with other people was of this form. She picked up a scalpel and began methodically to sterilize that as well. Time to do what she'd been sent here to do.

* * *

><p>"Would you prefer smoking or non-smoking?" the waitress bizarrely asked the two girls.<p>

"Um..." Kagami said. "How about non-smoking? We happen to be minors."

"This way, then!" the waitress announced.

"I'll just be in the bathroom," Tsukasa said.

Coming back from the toilet, Tsukasa saw Kagami sitting alone at her table, looking out the window.

"I was always wondering," she asked Kagami as she took a seat, "why do they have the toilets near the smoking section?"

"When you're always in the non-smoking section?" Kagami teased her. "No, but seriously... that is a good question."

"Hmm..." Tsukasa theorized. "Maybe so there's water to put things out when someone starts a fire."

"That seems dubious..." Kagami noted.

"Or maybe to cover up the stink!" Tsukasa volunteered.

"Okay, can we not talk about this right now? About toilets and stink and stuff?"

They were interrupted at this point by the arrival of Miyuki. Their beverages ordered, they sat around the table in silence for a while.

"So this is sort of our impromptu wake, I guess?" Kagami asked. "I guess I should say something nice about Konata for once – goodness knows I didn't do it often enough. I respect her a lot as a person. If you looked at her slacking off in class you couldn't ever guess how obsessively dedicated she was about some things. Remember she was describing her scheme for winning a mail-in contest with hundreds of individually handwritten postcards? Someone who applied that kind of dedication and attention to their homework would have been Japan's top honours student! And she actually went and got herself a part-time job when I suggested she do it! I mean her ideas about what was important in life were just not sane... but I guess that didn't matter in the end... so if it wasn't for the fact that she refused to take anything seriously," she blushed a little, "... and her stupid habit of teasing me whenever I tried to be even slightly nice to her.." tears appeared in Kagami's eyes.

Kagami broke down at this point, realizing guiltily that most of her memories of Konata were tainted with annoyance, but Tsukasa looked ready to take over.

"Do you also remember that time Kagami tried to get Konata to read 'The Idiot', and Kona-chan actually read it and decided to summarize it in her book report presentation – except she did it using nothing but anime cliches...?" she began.

* * *

><p><em>Konata boldly stands at the intersection of magical girls and Dostoyevski!<em>

"So, huh, Dostoyevski's 'The Idiot'." Konata drawled from the podium. "Dostoyevski called his main character an 'Idiot', but that is simply an indication of the imprecise and primitive language he was stuck writing in! Don't worry," she admonished the shocked stares she was getting, "... there's a punchline to all this, I'm not just whaling randomly on the Russians!"

Whereas her big sister snapped into sarcasm whenever Konata did something like this, Tsukasa just giggled awkwardly. This was laying it on a bit thick even for Konata.

"... now the way I see it, there is this character who is like a male _tsundere _permanently switched into _deredere _mode. He goes around and is all so _nice _to people all the time. He makes all these friends, but this is like in ancient Russia so already people are kind of worried about there being a man walking around like that – men weren't supposed to be _deredere_ in that society!"

"But things really start to go badly for him when he befriends the _dark magical girl_! Now everyone hates this girl, and they start hating the Idiot for trying to win her over to the good side and marry her... Eventually he loses all of his friends and starts having to put up with people who are far less nice to deal with! And then at the end this other guy that the Idiot was being all _deredere_ to **kills** the dark magical girl, for weird Russian reasons I didn't quite understand, and the resulting contradiction causes the Idiot to go insane and be sent back to Switzerland!"

"IN SHORT!" Konata pounded the podium, making the two or so people who hadn't been paying rapt attention sit up and take notice. "Using precise and clinical language, our privilege as anime cri... eh... book reviewers! We see nothing less than a cautionary tale for the one or two possible _tsundere_ in the audience! Your _tsuntsun _nature is not merely an inconvenient social burden, it is actively necessary to protect your emotional core! Deep down, you are really kind and sweet, but you just can't walk around with that side of you exposed all the time, unless you want to end up in an asylum in Switzerland! ~izzzzho~!" she concluded, indicating that her presentation was over.

The class sat still, trying to process what they had just heard, while Kuroi-sensei sweated, as she had to think of a mandatory follow-up question for the above freakish thing just uttered by Konata.

* * *

><p>"Yes, that was a highly unusual presentation." agreed Miyuki.<p>

"I only heard rumours, you guys never actually told me the content." Kagami's eyes were wide open and she gaped through her tears. "I'm surprised, though, she actually seems to have read the thing."

Her face darkened as though she were listening to an invisible Konata say something ridiculous.

"... or at least the Cliff's Notes for it. No... what am I saying... I should give her some credit... she probably had the stamina to read an entire library, only no motivation for it." Kagami continued.

"She certainly said a lot of weird things – the kind of stuff that you'd expect to make sense later on, but it never really made sense to me.." Tsukasa rejoined the conversation.

* * *

><p><em>Konata demonstrates an intuitive grasp of the Law of the Jungle!<em>

"Tsukasa!" Konata shouted desperately, clinging to the girl. "The world is always a battlefield! You get put in all these situations, and sometimes you can't show mercy even if you want to! You'd just get eaten for it if you did!"

"Uh..." said the clerk. "So are you going to pay for the DVD or not? There's sort of a line behind you."

* * *

><p>"Of course, she was talking about how she didn't have enough points to buy her favourite anime, but still," Tsukasa got a wondering look in her eyes, "it wasn't the sort of thing I ever expected to hear."<p>

"Why do you have to keep remembering the silly parts?" Kagami lamented.

"Well," Tsukasa stared into her milk tea, "that's just the sort of person she was. All the silly parts mixed in with what made her a nice person."

"No." Kagami swallowed her tears back. "This can't be happening! I've got to do something here!" she declared. "For the sake of Konata's memory..." she pounded the table dramatically. "... I must REMEMBER a memory of her that is nice, and not ridiculously silly!"

She had stood up and was glaring at no one in particular, as though daring the universe to tell her it was impossible. The universe was responding with a handful of bewildered-looking restaurant patrons.

...

"Give me a second here." Kagami said to her friends as she tried to think of something.

* * *

><p><em>Kagami actually remembers something nice about Konata!<em>

...

_No, she doesn't._

* * *

><p>Kagami broke down and started weeping outright. She'd been horrible, horrible. Did all of her memories of Konata seriously end up being about how the girl had teased her, or annoyed her, or done something stupid and ridiculous again? Why had they even been friends then? There must have been <em>some <em>reason Kagami cared... and she couldn't even remember it? What kind of a friend was she?

Tsukasa put both of her hands on Kagami's shoulders to try to comfort her, and looked at Miyuki. She hadn't said much so far, had she?

"I don't know..." Miyuki answered. "I don't think I was a very good friend to Konata either, now that I think of it. But you do realize how much she did to bring the four of us together? Certainly I wouldn't have you to talk to, if we hadn't shared Konata as a friend in the first place. I always felt so shy about starting conversations. But whenever she wanted to ask about some obscure trivia, she always ran to me about it. It made me feel happy to be so knowledgeable, even though it wasn't really the kind of knowledge that earns you good marks in school.."

"Maybe I should take onee-chan home now..." Tsukasa said. "She doesn't look like she's in any state to continue.."

"No..." Kagami sobbed. "We need to continue this... because she really did do a lot for us, didn't she? Even if she wasn't an easy person to act like a friend to..."

And so they kept talking, though it was hard to do.

* * *

><p>"Currently in the city, a number of elementary school girls have been approached from behind on the way to school..." the television announcer was saying.<p>

Sojiro and Yutaka were watching TV together. (After the initial pleasantries, it turned out they didn't really have much to talk about. Fortunately, modern society offers countless other ways for two people to waste time together without feeling awkward about it.)

"Yutaka," Sojiro announced. "You should be careful too! Of course, I can understand the perpetrator's way of thinking... but he's been all over the news for consecutive days now... yet he still has the gall to go up to little kids? What does he want? I really want to tell that bastard something! (_I'm jealous of you, man_.)"

Yutaka had got used to Sojiro acting like this already, and knew that the best response was to ignore whatever he was saying. An alarm in her watch beeped and she sighed. That was the signal to go upstairs and set up one of her machines, some device attached to a cord that she had to swallow down into her lungs every once in a while, to exercise them and keep them from slowly atrophying.

* * *

><p>Meanwhile, Kagami was in a bowling alley with Minegishi Ayano and Kusakabe Misao, two classmates with whom she'd been friends since middle school. Why bowling? Two words: Misao's idea. Kagami just couldn't agree with this.<p>

"Remind me again why we went bowling?"

"Well, I suppose bowling is nice." Ayano guessed. "None of us are any good at it, so there's not a lot of pressure to compete with one another."

"It's all for Kagami's sake so she can feel better!" Misao gestured grandly.

"I still don't get how this is supposed to make me feel better." Kagami dissented. The poster on the wall didn't help the mood either. It said something in English about how bowling would enable her to get "hot communication", which didn't seem right.

"But it's bowling!" Misao said.

"Yes." Kagami said. "It's bowling. I can see that."

"But when _I _get sad _I_ always like to fling heavy objects around!" Misao countered, getting two pins short of a strike. "Oh, lucky! But hey, it helps a lot! It worked like a charm when _my_ dad died!" she announced cheerily.

"... I don't really understand what sort of logic you operate on." Kagami concluded, taking a ball for herself.

Misao just grinned happily. "Misao logic!"

Not concentrating, Kagami accidentally let go of her own bowling ball while it was still in the air. It hit the surface of the lane with a resounding **CRACK**, then rolled into the gutter. An employee cleaning under some chairs gave the group a dirty look.

"OH, GODDAMN IT!" Kagami shouted.

"Yeah! That's the spirit!" Misao encouraged, earning a second dirty look from the employee.

"... you know," observed Kagami in her frustration, "I'm really not in the mood for this. I think I'll go home now."

"What!" Misao exclaimed. "But this was special bowling for the purpose of Kagami! There's no point in continuing if she doesn't feel better because of it!"

So they all wrapped up the game and went home. On the way there, they took a shortcut through a secluded alley, as people sometimes do. This time the odds that something unpleasant would happen while in the alley turned out to be against them.

"Hi there girlie," someone stated as he walked up to Kagami and unceremoniously grabbed her.

Only one person could use a pick-up line so unromantic... surely this must be the feared, the dreaded, vague child-approaching person we've been hearing so much about on the news! It seems he decided to try approaching high school girls next, which turned out to be a mistake for him.

Now remember that this guy probably didn't spend a lot of time honing his fighting moves. Mostly he went after elementary school children, who aren't exactly known for fighting back, particularly if a bit of subtlety is used when first approaching them (something entirely lacking in this particular encounter). When Kagami struggled free, he just grabbed her arm and tried inexpertly to twist it.

Kagami was not in the mood for this sort of thing. Ignoring the pain from the arm and whatever blows the man was trying to land in return, Kagami started to kick and punch whatever she could reach, as hard as she could.

"GODDAMN IT!" she was yelling. "FIRST KONATA DIES THEN MISAO GETS SOME STUPID IDEA OF BOWLING THEN SOME STUPID CHILD MOLESTER! I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS!"

"What the hell!" the man yelled as Kagami started to get the better of him. "You crazy delinquent! Ow!" he decided just to break free and get out of here. What had gotten into him to do this in the first place? This was a secluded alley, true, but to risk approaching a _group_ of these older girls?

Misao and Ayano just stood there as they realized Kagami had just pounded on a man significantly larger than her. Probably a very lazy and unathletic man with absolutely no fighting skills, but still.

"That was AWESOME!" Misao finally yelled. "Also, extremely convenient! Kicking people helps you work off negative emotions, too!"

"... just don't take that as an offer to kick any of us, okay?" she added just in case.

"Whatever.." Kagami winced. Her arm hadn't been sprained or broken, but it was still a close thing.

"Should we get that arm looked at?" Ayano asked.

"Yeah, we really should." Kagami said.

"No, but how will we explain it to the doctor?" Misao worried.

"Seriously. It's not like we couldn't just tell the truth that some man tried to molest me and twist my arm, but then I kicked him and he ran away. We should probably give a description of him as well. Easier than just walking around for five days and then having to explain why I never told anybody if my arm turns out to be sprained." Kagami explained patiently. "... I'm sorry I wasn't in the mood for bowling. I should've appreciated the thought, I guess."

"Anything for Kagami!" Misao brightened significantly.

* * *

><p>Tsukasa sat on the porch, wondering at the spring evening. To calm herself, she imagined Konata there next to her, not saying anything, just looking at the spring with her. She was pretty sure they'd done that at least once together..<p>

"They don't give us any homework for spring break, so it's really tranquil, isn't it?" she asked out loud.

"I'm pretty sure only people who actually do their homework in the first place during the term have the right to say that." a voice replied from behind her.

Oh, Kagami was back. Tsukasa looked at her wonderingly. Did onee-chan look slightly bruised?

* * *

><p>At a nearby police station, junior detective Matsuda was sorting through some recent incident reports, preparing to call it a night.<p>

"Hmm... another 'child-approaching incident'. Weird, though, the description doesn't match the other reports. Is this a new suspect?"

A quick scan of the other reports showed that, indeed, this was in fact a _different_ person from the longtime molester who was keeping the region in an uproar. Great, a completely new suspect to look out for.

* * *

><p>"Oh, hello!" Yutaka answered the door. "So you must be Hiiragi Tsukasa and Hiiragi Kagami! Konata-oneesan told me a lot about you guys. It's nice to finally meet you, I'm Kobayakawa Yutaka."<p>

"Nice to meet you," they bowed in return. Kagami frowned a little. "So what did Konata tell you about us?"

Yutaka's face kind of froze as she realized none of what Konata had told her would be very polite to repeat.

"... Never mind." Kagami noted. "I think I can guess from your reaction."

...

"So did you already have your graduation ceremony, Yutaka-chan?" Tsukasa asked as they made their way upstairs.

"Graduation, huh?" Kagami echoed dreamily. "That brings back memories... did you ever get a second button from anyone?"

"No, I didn't." Yutaka said, pointing out the uniform hanging on the wall of her room. "Our middle school uniform was a blazer. See, I decided to keep mine since you can even wear it normally!"

"I guess a lot of middle schools are like that now... does the practice of getting something from the person you like even exist anymore, I wonder?"

"Really?" Tsukasa rejoined. "That's sad... not that I did it though.."

"Yutaka-chan, did you like anyone at your old school?"

"No, no." Yutaka said. "You probably know already I have this condition," she indicated her orange hair as the other two girls nodded, "so I spent all of last year mostly absent and I kept getting sick whenever I came back. And whenever I was in school people spent too much time acting like they were sorry for me to make friends with them. And even before that I was really small... and looked like a child... so they'd tease me about it." She resumed her cheerful expression. "... so I never had time to like anybody, I guess!"

Kagami and Tsukasa looked at each other meaningfully. Probably this meant Yutaka didn't particularly want them to act sorry for her either.

...

"The differences between middle school and high school?" Tsukasa repeated Yutaka's subsequent question. "Well, joining a club is no longer mandatory..."

"... doesn't that depend on the school?" Kagami cut in. "It's just that ours is geared towards university preparation... so there's more material covered at a faster pace and not everyone ends up having time for clubs." She looked at Yutaka with concern. "Also, the commute takes a while, even from here... so you'll need a bit more stamina, won't you?"

"I'll be all right!" Yutaka informed them, pointing to a large metal stand in the corner of the room, filled with medical machinery. "I have all these machines and stuff I didn't have before to help keep me on my feet. I actually get to use some of these things before they're released onto the general market!"

Kagami read the label. "Iwasaki Laboratories... hmm.."

"Yep! Apparently few people as young as me have the condition, so they're paying for all the equipment in exchange just for seeing how well it works on me!" Yutaka continued happily. Some of the procedures she'd been performing were working, and she felt much less tired and weak these days.

"... don't they somehow financially sponsor Ryoo High? I'm pretty sure you even sign some kind of agreement with them when you enter the school..." Kagami said.

"... oh, for the organ donations!" Tsukasa remembered. "I think you agree that when you die many years later they get to take out half your brain." she pointed to one side of her head... then remembered that it was somehow important which half they took, so she then pointed to the other side uncertainly.

"That's right!" Yutaka was remembering as well. "Uncle said they already had someone over to do that to Konata.."

Kagami winced visibly when she heard this.

"I'm sorry I brought that up..." Yutaka felt obliged to say.

"Well," Kagami tried to remember. "Very few places in Japan are doing research of that sort on humans nowadays... I remember Iwasaki Labs having _some _kind of research program that required organ donations, though... something about solving the demographics crisis by cloning people, _I think_..." she tried to sort through the implications of that in her head..

"~~ya-hoo!" Yui-neesan interrupted at this point, bursting into the room and giving Yutaka a big thumbs up. "Congrats on your graduation ceremony, Yucchan! Let's all four of us celebrate by going out and getting really smashed!"

Yutaka was shocked by the idea, Tsukasa slightly discomfited, while Kagami tried to stammer a protest that they were minors... and wasn't she some kind of police officer anyways? Why would she try to get them drunk?

Without Konata to explain that Yui had been joking, the ensuing argument went a bit too far, Yui lost her good mood, grumbled something about how kids these days weren't any fun, and stomped downstairs to sulk about how her husband was working somewhere far away from Tokyo, again.

* * *

><p>The day before Konata's funeral and cremation, Kagami, Tsukasa, and Miyuki decided to give the body a brief final visit.<p>

They were sitting around their dead friend, each lost in her own thoughts, when Miyuki's phone started to vibrate.

"Sorry," she whispered. "I'm going to have to go outside and take that."

What Miyuki heard on the phone, she found somewhat bewildering. "... Eh? You're coming_ there_? You're going to do a _what_? ... And you're seriously calling it that? ..." her face fell. "My apologies, it's not my place to point this out, but isn't that sort of a desperation move? ... Well, thank you at least for warning me. You've avoided a somewhat embarrassing scene. ... Bye then."

"I'm very sorry," she told her friends when she returned. "I need to be somewhere else right now. Something unexpected came up at my workplace."

They nodded. About five minutes after Miyuki left, though, four completely unexpected visitors came into the room. The first was a policeman, acting deferential towards the presence of a dead body, and moving immediately to the side of the room. After him strolled in a strangely dressed man in his twenties, in a flamboyant green outfit and a cap with an inscription that read "Tencho" in permanent marker, and a prim salmon-haired woman in a business suit carrying a large toolcase. They flanked a grim old man with short green hair and glasses, clearly the most important one of the group. Ignoring the two twins sitting in the room, they proceeded to stare impolitely at Konata's body.

"Thankfully, it's not too late to deal with Legendary Girl A..."

"... Excuse me, what do you want here?"

"Hmm... kind of expensive to put a dead relative up on display this way, wouldn't you think?" the salmon-haired woman wondered. "Oh, in answer to your question, I, the **Red Shift Manager**..."

"... and I, **Green Shift Manager** (_even though this stands against everything I believe in!_) ..." the man with the 'Tencho' cap uttered dejectedly.

"... have come to perform a 'satanic ritual' over Legendary Girl A, in order to maintain the objective integrity of the universe!" Red Shift Manager finished, pointing to Konata's body. Strangely enough, the term 'satanic ritual' was indeed pronounced with quotation marks.

Kagami and Tsukasa stared.

The salmon-haired woman made use of their confused silence to put down her toolbox and start unpacking various arcane-looking metal sticks, cursing under her breath about how nothing had been packed properly. Kagami looked at the policeman desperately, but he refused to meet the girl's eyes. It was apparent that the policeman was just here to send a message that whoever these people were, and whatever they were trying to accomplish, the authorities were not going to interfere in any way, so there was no point for Kagami to call the police.

Kagami's phone rang.

"Hello? _Miyuki_? ... Why did you leave if you wanted to talk to us? What's going on? There's a policeman here and three crazy people shouting something about performing a demonic ritual on Konata..." there was a longer pause as Kagami listened to the explanation on the other end "... wait, you want me to do _what_? Miyuki-san, are you _sure_ this is a good idea? ... Come again? ... Wait, this is confusing. So you mean if you'd never seriously suggest such a thing and you're suggesting it now that means you're suggesting it seriously?"

Miyuki then said something which caused Kagami to facefault.

"All right then," she hung up.

"Okay." Kagami said calmly, putting away her phone. "Apparently if I challenge one of you to a one-on-one battle of some kind and win, you're supposed to leave and not bother Konata again, because of some rules of honor stuff?" she asked.

Tsukasa's stare increased a few centimeters in width on hearing that onee-chan would be getting into a fight with someone.

Kagami looked at the policeman again hesitantly, wondering whether the police were really endorsing this kind of thing now.

The important green-haired man nodded to confirm that this was, indeed, how things would work.

"_You _get to do the fighting." Red Shift Manager immediately said to Green Shift Manager.

"What?" Tencho looked suprised. "Are you sure?" he asked, as though she was being an idiot.

"Two women fighting while _you _ogle us? _That_ would be unacceptable." she noted haughtily.

Green Shift Manager just shrugged. "Your funeral. Rather than defiling a gravesite with our impure intentions.. how about we find a secluded alley to do this in?" he asked Kagami.

"What, _again_?" Kagami asked, drawing puzzled looks from everyone. "All right then. I guess I'm supposed to do this."

After moving to a secluded alley – the _exact same _alley she'd already met the child molester in, Kagami noted with displeasure – the man with short green hair suddenly took it upon himself to act as a sort of referee. Explaining the rules – and there were very few rules, it was going to be no-holds-barred unarmed combat until one of the opponents lost consciousness or begged for mercy – he announced that the battle had begun. Kagami was immediately distracted by the sheer insanity of the situation. She looked at the policeman questioningly, but the policeman just shrugged as if to say "can't help you here either."

Of course, there was no contest. Not only did Tencho actually turn out to have training in hand-to-hand combat, he got to apply it while Kagami was still looking at the policeman. Screaming like a maniac, he immediately caught her in a headlock. Kagami still struggled determinedly.

"Look..." he hissed into Kagami's ear, hopefully quietly enough so that the referee didn't hear. "I'm on your side! I have no desire to perform this 'satanic ritual' on your friend there!" he managed to shout and whisper simultaneously. "... I'm going to throw this fight for you. I've got you in a really dumb headlock, to break it you just..." and he went through a few of the basic principles of street-fighting as quickly as he could while trying to keep up the appearance of a life-and-death struggle.

He jerked Kagami diagonally in one direction, lifting her off her feet!

"... and then you do ..."

He jerked her towards the ground, nearly causing Kagami's legs to crumple underneath her!

"... so that ..."

Fortunately Kagami caught on and tried to put up her side of the fight, so it really did look like Tencho was using some excessively overblown fighting style against a desperately struggling opponent he'd caught in a headlock.

"... okay, whenever you're ready now." Tencho whispered.

Miyuki had arrived in the meantime. But, Tsukasa noticed, she was now standing with these other people! She was asking Red Shift Manager something, and Red Shift Manager was answering! Miyuki didn't seem to like whatever the answer had been, and she snapped at Red Shift Manager. Why did they know one another?

Meanwhile Kagami was trying to concentrate on what Tencho was saying and follow the instructions. In the end she managed to break the headlock and throw the Tencho over her head into one of the walls, knocking him out.

It seemed the Tencho's flailings actually had an illustrative purpose. In the end, she simply kind of mirrored and reversed his motions, in a way that was difficult to describe and she couldn't have managed without the explanation to go with the moves. The resulting throw was shakily done – she'd thrown the man at an odd angle, for one thing – and she wasn't entirely sure if the Tencho had been knocked out, or was just pretending to be unconscious.

"Amazing." Red Shift Manager announced sarcastically after a pause. "Anizawa is truly one of the few people on the planet capable of practically defeating an opponent in seconds, then making such a stupid mistake." She turned to the green-haired man. "Takahashi-shacho, I _told _you we should have hired Gotouza-sama just in case something like this happened, she's for hire these days, you know?"

Takahashi-shacho was shaking a little. "Not proportionate to the situation.." he forced the words out through his teeth. "No reason for wasting so much money on a last-minute half-baked plan like this. We're leaving now. As for _you_," he snapped threateningly at Green Shift Manager, who looked in no condition to listen, "your performance will be reviewed at the next employee performance review. And that is going to happen soon, trust me. And as for _you_," he snapped at Miyuki, "don't be so hasty to clean out your office yet. We're having a meeting on further contingency strategies to deal with the Legendary Girl A situation which you will be **required **to attend." he growled.

The Red Shift Manager and the policeman (carrying the supposedly unconscious Tencho) followed Takahashi-shacho's departing figure. Miyuki was left behind to look Kagami and Tsukasa in the eyes helplessly.

"Wait, what was this 'Legendary Girl A' stuff? Are these the people you work for?" Kagami asked. "What did they want with Konata? Is there something you weren't telling us?"

Miyuki's expression faded morosely. "There's been a lot I haven't been telling you..."

Miyuki didn't finish, and ran away.

"What? Miyuki, wait!" Kagami called after her. "No one's accusing you of anything!"

* * *

><p>Since Konata's funeral happened, Yutaka was having to grow up a lot. Not only did Sojiro offer little help with routine cooking, she was having to daily administer a range of complicated treatments to herself. Sure, she had automatic reminders of her schedule, and a doctor would drop by and check on her every once in a while... but it was still up to her to actually use the machinery she'd been provided with. She was helped by the knowledge that Konata-oneesan had always made her own lunch, at least.<p>

"Yucchan, now that you're living here, maybe I should take you to Disneyland or something tomorrow?" Sojiro asked her one evening, after taking some time to cook dinner for both of them. "Since it's the end of spring break."

Yutaka had already been on a school trip to Disneyland in the past few months. Surprisingly, despite being afraid that most of the rides wouldn't agree with her, she tried going on one and enjoyed it a lot. So she tried going on a slightly scarier ride, and then an even scarier one. She was feeling far more energetic than she'd ever been since the illness, so, flushed and excited, she even went on the rides where she barely squeaked by the height requirements and where the lineup mostly consisted of burly men who'd been feeling pretty excited about finding such a scary ride in a Disneyland. After she rode multiple times on one particularly elaborate rollercoaster, one of the ride operators noticed and even insisted on getting a picture with the sickly-looking irradiated girl.

Coming home, she slept through the next night like a baby and woke up feeling... more or less as usual. There didn't seem to have been much benefit from the experience, but there'd been no repercussions for her health either. She felt somewhat guilty about taking advantage of her uncle to go again.

"Um... I really appreciate it..." Yutaka was about to protest about the inconvenience to her uncle, but then realized that a trip to Disneyland would be as much for Sojiro's emotional benefit as for her own "... so sure, that sounds nice!"

* * *

><p>At the Iwasaki residence, Daiichi Minami was eating dinner in silence with the head of Iwasaki Laboratories. Cherry, their large white dog, kept begging for a scrap of something fried.<p>

"I don't really understand." Minami asked suddenly.

"Hmm?" asked Iwasaki-san, trying to hide the fact that she was _still_ somewhat shaken from her falling-out with Takara Yukari.

"Why do you ask me to act all logical, infallible, and emotionless when it's not actually true?"

Iwasaki-san sighed and started trying to formulate a suitably reassuring answer.

* * *

><p><strong>BONUS OMAKE: <strong>"Lucky Channel!" donates to the reconstruction effort.

"Lu-c-ky Channel!" screamed the hyperactive but always (_always, damn it!_) fun and pleasant TV idol Kogami Akira as her segment came on the air.

"How time flies! The story is already on its second chapter..." Akira was saying.

"... and so Lucky Channel is going to do a special episode," cut in her handsome (_and unfairly popular_) assistant Shiraishi Minoru, "about Kobayakawa syndrome. It's been, what, a year since Fukushima Daiichi happened?"

Shiraishi held up a large photograph of a smiling Kobayakawa Yutaka, complete with wispy orange hair done up in pigtails.

"... affecting about 0.5% of the people near the area affected by Fukushima Daiichi, Kobayakawa Syndrome is new and as of yet poorly investigated by medical science. Problems include lack of energy from respiratory and circulatory difficulties, propensity to catch other serious diseases, and stigma due to the prominent symptom of orange hair, all of which contribute to an inability .."

He winced as Akira kicked him under the table to cut short the lecture already.

"... so, uh, umumum ..." Shiraishi scrambled to finish concisely. "Iwasaki Labs needs your help with funding to develop treatment methods! With your help we can get the equipment necessary to live a normal life under the price of a high-end motorcycle!"

"... so to raise awareness and get all of her beautiful fans to donate, Akira dyed her hair orange!" Akira announced.

There was an awkward silence.

"_Um, Akira-sama_." Minoru whispered. "_Wasn't your hair orange _before _this episode?_"

(_No, look closely, idiot._) Akira rasped. Her hair was indeed a slightly different shade of orange now.

Shiraishi stammered. "Oh, so it must have been dyed before too, that's a relief, I was suspecting you were some kind of Project Or..."

(_ARE YOU IMPLYING SOMETHING, PUNK?_) Akira screamed.

"No, no, of course not, how could I when there was never any Project Oran..."

Someone offscreen must have made a gesture to him not to utter the term on television.

"... anyhow... _huh, that's odd, they're swapping out the teleprompter, ..." _Minoru looked offscreen. "_This is a very haphazard show we're having today, folks_."

"So the post-tsunami reconstruction may have been accomplished by now but there are still..." Akira looked somewhere else offscreen. "... but Fukushima ..."

(_What the crap, two_ different _teleprompters?_) she wondered.

Akira's gaze darted cross-eyed from one off-screen teleprompter to another as she stammered bits and pieces of dialogue.

(_MAKE UP YOUR MINDS ALREADY!_) she broke off to seethe at someone offscreen.

(_Wait this other one completely fails to make sense, isn't Lucky Channel supposed to exist in this in-between continuity where the Lucky Star characters are fictional but... oh why bother nobody cares about continuity on this show except me anyways._) she grumbled.

"... anyhow," Akira resumed once the number of teleprompters being thrown at her was winnowed down to one, "in the real world Kobayakawa Syndrome doesn't exist, but the earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima Daiichi incident only happened recently and so there's still lots of infrastructure rebuilding to do! I hear donations are still being solicited and stuff! And that's all for today, because we've run out of time here at Lucky Channel!"

"Bye-bee!" both hosts shouted at the camera.

The ending credits started rolling.

(_Shiraishi, that was atrocious today, just atrociously unprofessional._)

"_Well they only told us it would be about Fukushima Daiichi at the last minute..._"

(_EXCUSES, EXCUSES, EXCUSES! That's all I hear from you, isn't it, well if I have my say the show is getting a different..._)

... and that's all for today, folks! (Unless one wishes to stay and hear Shiraishi Minoru sing a girly song, that can be arranged.)

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Notes: <strong>I'm pretty sure that Dostoyevski is well known in Japan. There was an Akira Kurosawa film based on 'The Idiot' which moved the setting to Hokkaido. And the late, great, and semi-lamented Osamu Tezuka even did a manga which butchered the basic premise of 'Crime and Punishment' (and he was inspired by the fact that his old high school did a school play based on the book). To my annoyance, Tezuka managed to butcher 'Crime and Punishment' to an even greater extent than Konata just butchered 'The Idiot'.

They wouldn't teach Dostoyevski in high school, though, which was why I needed Kagami to make the recommendation. (What, you thought she only ever reads trashy light novels?) I can only assume Kagami really liked 'The Idiot' for some reason. Perhaps the very reason picked up on by Konata!

I am actually far _less_ sure about whether Japanese schools ever do anything like book report presentations. It seems like they'd consider making every student listen to every other student a waste of time. On the other hand, as we will see in greater detail, the Ryoo High in this universe is somewhat... unusual in any case.

I don't really know the elder Iwasaki's first name; if it turns out she has a name in canon, I'll edit it in but right now she will just be known as Iwasaki-san. Minami's last name has been changed to Daiichi for reasons that will eventually be made clear. Misao's dad isn't actually dead in canon, but since he isn't important enough to have a name even in the manga, I decided I could diverge from canon in this regard.

And as everyone knows, pink-haired people in anime are kind, gentle, and outgoing. Except sometimes they're also secretly angry, twisted husks with the emotional stability of nitroglycerin, like Louise from 'Zero no Tsukaima', or Miyuki in Tastychainsaws' fanfic 'Miyuki: Thespian Extraordinaire', currently (when this chapter was posted) in the process of being awesomely rewritten!


	3. Konata's Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction

**Ten Percent Worth Dying For Season 1: **This Universe Is Experiencing Technical Difficulties

**Chapter 3, **Konata-san's Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction

Standard Disclaimer: fanfiction consists of derivative works written by fans who wish to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them! Please support the creators of the original works referenced in this fanfic, particularly Lucky Star.

Nonstandard Disclaimer: Additionally, this chapter and subsequent chapters was partly inspired by descriptions of the non-physical realm found in Robert Monroe's "Journeys Out of the Body" trilogy, which was intended as a documentary work. Since it describes locations which anyone with the requisite skills can allegedly visit, I feel it's fair game to modify and adapt the locations to a fanfic, just as if the characters were taking a trip to, say, Australia.

Also, this chapter has more or less every single spoiler for things that everyone knows about already, like the one for book six of Harry Potter. You've been warned.

* * *

><p>The bus crash had been terrible. The coma... it was as though Konata's brain had spent the entire month jammed in a door, unable to think properly. Then the question, and the unexpected and startling answer.<p>

Now what?

Nothing.

Really?

_Nothing, nothing_, it had better **damn **well be _nothing_, Konata thought angrily.

No, but really? said the more realistic part of her mind.

It felt like one of those meditations, where they tell you to clear your mind but you can't, and keep thinking about irrelevant things, like, like...

Like how some branches of Buddhism taught you that to center the mind on nothingness was nearly impossible? The mind would always drift to something irrelevant... so it was extremely unlikely that anyone would experience _nothing _after they died? Konata wasn't sure if she was up to date on her Buddhism. Probably she'd merely come up with some Buddhist-sounding nonsense just now.

Maybe it was a bit late to have a religious epiphany after you were dead, Konata decided, and stopped worrying about it.

Instead she felt the two emotions almost every newly dead person feels.

First, they feel extremely silly for having worried about death so much.

Second, they have no idea what is _actually _going to happen now, so they start to get a bit worried.

So okay, what _other_ kind of irrelevant things did people think about at this point?

Who was she anyway?

Konata started to not just worry, but even panic a little.

Wait, she'd been angry about something just now. She followed the thread of that emotion back to a memory, and felt a little silly for panicking about something that had been so important to her in the first place. Well, she reflected, being alive certainly did strange things to your head.

Let's see... it was something like she'd crawled into this particular dimension to take a nice long nap...

She giggled to herself. Some of her friends had thought she was so weird when she'd told them.

"Wait, a _nap_? Are you crazy to call it that? You do realize that you're talking about incarnation, the most extreme of extreme sports there is! You're going to spend another _century _at the whims of an objective physical reality, and you're calling it a _nap_?"

Konata puffed out her chest self-importantly. "You are just playing into my trap here. After I take my little _nap_ I will be thought of as the most suave and handsome little thing around, who always keeps her cool no matter what," she whispered to the other presence, "anything you say in front of everyone else that plays up my awesomeness is going to just help me."

"Honestly. All the stupid reasons people think of to incarnate, and you just managed to top most of them."

Konata just smirked. "I mean, what's there to lose?"

"Your insufferable sense of pride, for one thing? How about you actually engage in some _planning _and arrange for spirit guides and stuff so you're not just diving into this headfirst? You know, like **normal **foolhardy-insane people do." The other presence stammered. "I... I.. actually... I think I should come with you to make sure you don't do anything stupid."

"O-oh." Konata teased shamelessly. "I think someone _likes_ me."

She was rewarded with a blush on the other end of the conversation. "I mean, it'll just look stupid if you come crawling back because you fell off a balcony before you turned twenty or something."

Damn her! Konata thought. She just preempted my entire strategy! Now it'll just look like I'm doing something stupid and foolhardy and _she'll _look like she's a responsible being looking after me. I hope she just gets lost in there and we never meet and then _she'll _be the one who looks stupid for failing like that!

Wait, had that really happened, or was she just making up this conversation in her own head? Konata wondered. There was also another set of memories that contradicted the first... had one eaten the other? She distinctly remembered having been eaten at some point.

Wait, eaten? Let's see, she was having lunch at some point... then she was full of herself and had crawled into a convenient nearby dimension to take a nap... because, that's what she was, some kind of exotic creature who takes naps... she was distinctly losing track of what was real or not here.

"That's what you are, an exotic creature who takes naps." Kagami's deadpan startled Konata out of nowhere. Wait, another memory. She'd actually said that at some point? ...

... Kagami!

Konata grasped at the single straw that could pull her out of this torrent of contradictory memories. Let's see, it had probably been in class... or at lunch, Kagami didn't attend the same class as Konata... Konata had probably been complaining about how she'd fallen asleep in class again and got a whack from Kuroi-sensei.

Backtracking... so she had crawled into a convenient nearby dimension to take a nap... _for reasons that are not worth examining at this point_ Konata thought quickly to preempt another nonsensical reminiscence. She'd been startled somewhat from her complacency by a sense of the impressive character potential of one Hiiragi Kagami. So, acting in a calm and collected manner, she set up the necessary conditions for Kagami to achieve this potential. One of which turned out to involve Konata being removed from the picture by a speeding bus.

Well, nuts.

More importantly than _seeing_ Kagami's further development, Konata wouldn't be able to congratulate the girl when she attained her full potential as a _tsundere_ character! Because she was now dead.

She kicked a nearby bookshelf in frustration.

Wait, kicking a bookshelf? Okay, Konata tried to go over her position again.

She'd been hit by a bus. Before that she'd been buying some stuff in some store, and realized Kagami's character potential. Konata was pretty sure she was forgetting some very important element of her _own _character.

... right, manga and anime!

Oh! This was the Animate shop that she'd been in immediately prior to the incident. Stands to reason that she'd imagine a place that she found comforting... though did she really subconsciously prefer the Ikebukuro branch? That was very weird because they almost never had any good deals.

However, dead people probably don't use money, so whether the deals here were good or not was a non-issue, Konata decided.

She wandered for a while amid the half-empty shelves. A bit dimly lit, and somewhat lonely without the usual clerks vaulting over shelves in a desperate scramble to sell her things. What had been up with that anyway? she thought as she stared at yet another row of shelves and realized that this place was a bit too large to be the Ikebukuro shop she remembered. It was more like a symbolic compendium of the entire past and future output of Japan's copiously prolific manga and anime industry. Past and future? Indeed, she was _certain _that if she wandered some more she might come across an anime that hadn't been created yet.

It wasn't an entirely comforting place, Konata decided. It had all her favorite anime, but it was also permeated by Konata's own anxiety about what was going to happen _next_. All the anime and manga ever created, that ever would be created, gathered in a single building. Izumi Konata's entire universe contained within four walls. What would be waiting for her outside?

However, they still had that new Sgt. Frog comic, Konata noticed. She decided to just read that for a while. Not like she was in any hurry at this point.

* * *

><p>Meanwhile, in a shadowy room within the Tokyo offices of Animate, five very different people were sitting around a table, having a meeting.<p>

"Allow me to open this third special emergency meeting of the Legendary Girl A Task Force..." Task Force Manager Tsuruya-san announced. "by summarizing our 'progress' so far. Or rather, the lack thereof."

Tsuruya-san hated being compared with the Tsuruya character in 'The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya', probably because they shared nothing besides the last name and hair colour within the vaguely olive spectrum. A fairly staid Project Olive man, with an affection for old Western silent movies, something unusual for an executive in an ultramodern anime distribution conglomerate. His co-workers snickered behind his back at his out-of-date tastes. So to spite them, he grew a style of moustache made popular by the endearing silent film actor Charlie Chaplin, except on Tsuruya-san it just had an off-putting sinister effect for some reason. Perhaps since as a middle manager he was required to yell at people and generally make his subordinates miserable on a daily basis.

"... thus, Legendary Girl A has been made aware of the _existence _of Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction but did not actually get the chance to _consume_ the information within it before her untimely death." Tsuruya-san was saying, trying desperately to ignore how silly this was all getting. "In summary, allow me to shout extremely loudly on behalf of our President..."

"**... YOU EXTREMELY INCOMPETENT BUNCH OF !#$%!**" he shouted.

From his vantage point at the head of the table green-haired Takahashi-shacho, the President of the entire vast conglomeration known as Animate, nodded calmly to confirm the sentiment. His glasses glinted ominously in the dim light.

"GAAH!" shouted the infamous and by now very uncomfortable Green Shift Manager, Anizawa Meito. "Why do you have to do it so loudly!"

"**Because only by shouting childishly can the TRUE depth of our displeasure be expressed!**"

Miyakawa Hinata, the Red Shift Manager, just shrugged and leaned back in her chair. "You know, I'm on loan from Gamers here. All this is accomplishing is just tarnishing your company's reputation even further."

This provoked further shouting from Tsuruya-san about how even if she was an employee of Gamers, the salmon-haired woman was just tarnishing the reputation of her _own _company by contributing to this debacle!

One thing she'd learned very quickly, Direct Observation Chief Takara Miyuki reflected as she sat quietly in her place, was that corporate meetings were not very productive. Fortunately Tsuruya-san was a bit hesitant to shout at a high school girl half his age, so Miyuki was often the one who ended up reining him in. She raised her hand.

"Uh, Takara-san, this isn't a high school. You can just speak up." Tsuruya-san broke off to note.

"Well, I'm afraid I don't quite understand the situation even after your summary, Tsuruya-san. You say that Legendary Girl A was aware of the existence of the Fanfiction and did not read it, as though that were somehow _worse _than if she had failed to read the Fanfiction due to merely being unaware of it." Miyuki found she hadn't stated that as clearly as she'd hoped. "That is to say, were there somehow additional risks in between her finding the Fanfiction and her reading it?"

"Uh..." Tsuruya-san was stumped. How would he know? All he knew about this Legendary Girl A stuff was contained in his mission briefing, and he was beginning to suspect that Takahashi-shacho had just made that up as part of some power game to see how many ridiculous notions he could get his loyal employees to swallow. The President was just the kind of person who would do such things in his spare time, even at the great expense of maintaining a division of Animate devoted entirely to nonsense.

"Since as a result of upcoming events you may all soon be dead. Or even fired. Or possibly both. I guess I can afford to explain to you exactly _how _this will happen. Even Tsuruya-san is not entirely qualified to understand the severity of this situation." Takahashi-shacho announced.

"Meh!" Green Shift Manager opined to himself. All this meant was that Takahashi-shacho was probably about to spend an hour listening to the sound of his own voice again.

"Excuse me, was that a threat?" Red Shift Manager asked the President in a dangerous-sounding voice.

Miyuki tried to keep herself from breaking out in a cold sweat. Being fired was all right, but _dead_? What had she gotten herself into?

* * *

><p>For some reason, Sgt. Frog and Konata never quite seemed to get along. The series had given her nightmares as a child for some reason, and neither did reading it now prove a comforting experience.<p>

Now she was imagining evil alien frogs lurking behind every shelf.

More to the point, she was imagining all of the things that had worried her in life.

How, in the end, she always had a scheduling conflict between friends and gaming, that didn't really go away no matter how many time management tricks she applied to the problem.

How whenever her dad hugged her, she had to keep her eyes peeled and worry about whether or not he was getting _too _friendly with her personal space. How annoying and hypocritical it felt to keep reminding him that he was getting carried away with his loli tendencies.

How Kagami never seemed to take a joke the right way. She was a _tsundere_, certainly, but would it have killed her to just brush Konata's remarks off for once? Konata had always teased the girl in good fun...

_Things _started to detach themselves from her. Things like transparent worms.

"So, brat, do you believe in demonic possession?" one of them asked suddenly. "Too bad, because we exist whether you like it or not."

On top of that, Konata was remembering things she had definitely experienced once, strange meaningless spaces of furious sound and color that she could not make head or tail of.. these were also a part of her but they were threatening to overwhelm who she was as Izumi Konata, of late an otaku, life cut short tragically in a traffic accident close to the age of eighteen...

Frightened by all the things happening around her, and driven by some self-preservation instinct, she grabbed another manga off the shelf and began reading it. This proved to distract her nicely, so she read another one. And another. Not really wanting to think about anything else.

* * *

><p>"In short, we are operating under the worst case assumption that Legendary Girl A will be able to act on her information in spite of being dead. The 'satanic ritual' we were forestalled from performing would have indeed sent a very large amount of what we understand to be demons to vex her, which would probably destabilize her awareness sufficiently to prevent her from doing anything for at least a decade. Yes, Miyakawa-san, you seem to be making a sour face at me?"<p>

"This whole business with taking action despite Legendary Girl A being dead," Red Shift Manager asked sceptically, "isn't it just a load of bollocks? It's fairly obvious to _me_ as the person with greatest experience in the supernatural that, for one reason or another, dead people do not interfere with physical reality in any meaningful way. Certainly a haunting might occur, but to talk about the end of the world in this manner..."

"Nevertheless, this is the worst case assumption we can make, and as I control the funding for this group I am able to exercise my discretion and declare that it is an assumption worth making! As I was saying, the ritual would not have been a permanent solution. It would have simply forestalled the issue for another few decades or so, allowing me to spend my time until the end of the world retired on a beach in Hawaii. Instead of staring at you buffoons."

"Uh... Takahashi-shacho.." Miyuki began. "I know that I am only the intern here and I wasn't hired based on my knowledge of supernatural things, so I'm in over my head here... but could you please explain again exactly why Konata... sorry, Legendary Girl A... anyhow, why she is... you know..."

Tencho just shrugged and stared at the table, waiting for the ordeal to be over.

* * *

><p>Despite being dead, Konata noted idly, her mind was still conditioned to consume information on what felt like a twenty-four-hour cycle – judging by how much manga she managed to get through before getting the sense that something <em>else <em>should be happening now – which meant that at this point there was nothing between herself and her anxieties. It was surprising, but she was finding that she was just not made to read manga for the rest of eternity.

Now as she looked around, everything seemed to suggest a memory that was painful or annoying. The demons from before were wound about her, poking at her dully. They pointed to rows of shelves, more manga to read. They swam in front of her vision and the shelves seemed to multiply. More and more manga to read. Less time to be with her friends. Putting that time off further, and further, and then never meeting them again before death...

This remainder bin... the Ikebukuro Bin of Shame, it was called? Here someone from behind the counter had misused her, possibly leading to her death. She looked at the sales counter.

The counter was empty. There was no one to talk to here.

Someone standing behind the counter here once grabbed her mind, twisted it, forced it into a shape that was painful to remember.

The counter was empty.

She looked at the remainder bin again. A DVD case was lying open at the very top of the pile. She recognized the insert booklet. She'd been holding it when she was hit by that bus, hadn't she?

_Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction_. What did that mean, anyways?

She picked it up and began reading.

...

Well, that at least explained why she didn't know about 'Lucky Star'. Disturbing as it was to find a 'fanfiction' that went into her own life in such detail, even though it hadn't been very good at guessing her own or her friends' motivations. But it made her feel a bit less anxious. Less likely to drown in memories of some nonsensical past life before she was living on Earth with her friends.

As before the accident, she felt a bit more rooted in her own life and the ties to her most recent family. In fact, she couldn't wrench her mind away from that aspect of her existence now even if she'd wanted to. This meant that all of the demons and strange memories were gone. She was in the Ikebukuro Animate shop, or a place that was similar enough to it.

In short, Konata felt alive now. Which gave her an even better grip on the fact that she was dead. Well, at least now she was feeling quite calm about the fact.

* * *

><p>"... as proven when I uncovered an Ancient Egyptian prophecy regarding the recent incursion into our reality by the extremely dangerous Fanfiction Devouring Spirit!" Takahashi-shacho announced. "Our purpose as an organization was to neutralize this phenomenon, but instead you have only managed to aggravate it!"<p>

There was a brief silence at this point.

"Fanfiction... Devouring Spirit?" Red Shift Manager repeated derisively.

"Yes. As it turns out, 'fanfiction' is Ancient Egyptian for 'end of the world'! I am somewhat rusty on my Egyptology, but reliable sources have told me that this is indeed the case."

"R.. really?" Tsuruya-san wondered. "And... exactly what does our division have to do with the end of the world... I realize it's a bit late for me to be asking this..."

"Clearly we seem to be going around in circles..." the President responded. "I should never have attempted to explain this to you! It relies on concepts not suitable for expression in the verbal manner! Not something a paper-pusher like you could understand! However, I will explain to you one last time, and if anyone dares to ask a stupid question afterwards I shall scream. The Fanfiction Devouring Spirit invades the universe from outside by fusing with an incarnating soul, producing an avatar such as the Legendary Girl A in question. If left untreated, after a number of years it exerts arbitrary story-related influence on the universe, taking cues from the desires of its host. The first such incident, of course, led to the destruction of Atlantis, so I would indeed not find it surprising if events managed to unfold that would cause me to end up dead, and you fired, or perhaps vice versa... However, if a suitable Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction is fed to the spirit, it detaches from the host and dwells in the far more compelling conceptual reality depicted within the Fanfiction. It then wrecks the conceptual reality instead of our own reality, so instead of the possible end of the universe we end up with a badly written fanfiction. No big loss for the universe, and no one will be aware how close we were to universal destruction."

He paused for breath.

"The recent sequence of events, however, guarantees that Legendary Girl A will remain fused with Fanfiction Devouring Spirit in the afterlife, and curiosity will inevitably lead her to consume the Fanfiction _after _her death. Our conjecture based on the prophecy is that Legendary Girl A's attention is thus permanently fixed on this universe, due to its being the closest _existing _information structure to the depicted conceptual reality of the Fanfiction. Thus I am of the opinion that Fanfiction Devouring Spirit is at this moment trying to break _into _this universe in order to wreak arbitrary story-related influence. This is an extremely dangerous situation!"

Tsuruya-san slumped in his chair as he realized no progress was going to be made here. None of this was making any sense to him.

"Before you ask, the way in which we know that Izumi Konata, namely Legendary Girl A, namely the host of Fanfiction Devouring Spirit is indeed the host of Fanfiction Devouring Spirit, is indeed the ostensible public reason for the existence of this division. You were all recruited under the impression that Legendary Girl A was merely a statistically average otaku, and thus a very useful predictor of future sales. But as we all know, being in market research, there is no such thing as a statistically average otaku. Every otaku has a certain set of specific preferences, and only in aggregate do they cluster around the statistical mean. Thus by being statistically average within the otaku segment – by having almost no specific preferences – Izumi Konata was in fact the most statistically extraordinary person our market researchers had ever encountered!"

He took another breath.

"When I matched this discovery to the prophecy, I realized that what we were dealing with something far more serious than a useful and improbable marketing research shortcut. Only by the influence of this Fanfiction Devouring Spirit could a completely average otaku have been produced. Incidentally, we would have known that our mission was a success because once Legendary Girl A consumed the Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction in a proper fashion, she would have ended up with a significantly reduced tolerance for conceptual information, obviously ceasing both to be an otaku and to be useful for further market prediction."

"And... I'm sorry.. why does arbitrary story-related influence by... Fanfiction Devouring Spirit.. imply the end of the world?" Miyuki persisted stubbornly in trying to make sense of all this. She was getting a very odd picture in her head from the President's final words. What if they'd succeeded? How would she react to a Konata who was no longer an otaku?

"**AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!**" Takahashi-shacho carried out his earlier threat.

"Takara-san, are you aware what happens when all the major plot points of a story are taken care of, in the anime industry?" he then asked her.

"Uh..."

"_It ends_."

"Well, unless they budget for a sequel." Tsuruya-san contributed lamely.

"There is no _they _here! There is no _end_! There is merely an arbitrary phenomenon which may or may not do _anything _at this point, whose influence it is now going to be **our **responsibility to isolate and curtail!" Takahashi-shacho screamed at his uncomprehending audience.

"I thought we were planning to just sit around and wait for the world to end?" Red Shift Manager asked sarcastically.

"No! In particular, we are going to require Takara-san's further assistance in this matter. Since Fanfiction Devouring Spirit is likely to focus its influence around the former friends and family of Izumi Konata, Takara-san's understanding of what is and is not normal for said friends and family is needed in order to determine what improbable events may be expected due to the Spirit's influence..."

* * *

><p>Several months prior to this story, Hiiragi Kagami had decided to join a swimming team, to keep fit and to keep her weight under control (oh how Konata had teased her about that). The team coach was an alarming man who was prone to making all of his swimmers do <em>all <em>the menial work related to managing the team.

Thus, while Miyuki was stuck in her interminable Animate meeting, Kagami was lugging a heavy sports bag filled with additional lane ropes, spare flippers, flotation devices, and other training paraphernalia from the coach's storage locker to the swimming pool. On the way, she took a shortcut through a secluded alley.

Yes, the exact same alley. Perhaps, Kagami was thinking, lightning could strike twice in the same place, but three times was one time too much...

Oh bother.

The same pervert from before just had to be standing there. Another man Kagami didn't recognize was standing next to him.

"Somehow I just knew we'd be meeting here again girlie," the molester spat drunkenly, "can't avoid a fated meeting, can you? Fortunately I brought muscle."

The other man pulled out a knife and advanced towards Kagami with obvious unfriendly intent.

Kagami suddenly found that she had precisely zero tolerance for this kind of thing. She screamed bloody murder and swung her sports bag at the thug.

... _whoosh _...

*snap*

It turned out to make a very good bludgeon. Had she just... broken the man's arm? Kagami stared at the thug as he clutched his arm in obvious pain, at a very odd angle.

The muscle decided that with his knifing arm injured he wasn't in the mood for this and ran away.

"WAIT! What about the advance?" the molester shouted after him.

"Delinquent crazy girls cost extra!" was the response he got.

"I AM NOT A DELINQUENT!" Kagami yelled, though her expression did not make the statement credible.

"AND YOU... IF I SEE YOU AGAIN I'M PUTTING YOU STRAIGHT IN A JAIL!" Kagami shouted at the pervert, not quite certain if the threat was realistic. She had really lost it this time, hadn't she? The man was turning pale and running away, which was making Kagami kind of self-conscious.

She was becoming impressed at her sheer dumb luck in these encounters. And also a bit worried. The neighbourhood seemed to be getting kind of dangerous. If this was going to become a regular occurrence, would it hurt for her to take some precautions? she wondered as, a little shaken, she continued carrying the bag towards her destination.

* * *

><p>After exiting from the library (she'd come to think of the place as a library more than a shop, since no one had been selling anything in it) Konata spent quite a while staring at the sign.<p>

It was quite a big sign. Written in shining golden letters across half the sky, it said something along the lines of "POPE URBAN X IS A DICKWEED". It seemed somewhat odd for this to be the most prominent feature in an afterlife. Annoyingly, it distracted her from looking at the rest of the scenery.

"Ah yes. I see you are staring at our beloved _Touristique Sign_." someone noted sarcastically. "There's quite a story behind it actually. Apparently, some influential lady in the Middle Ages paid the Pope a lot of money to ensure that her son went to heaven after he died. Instead he went to a place where... let's just say it's put me off hentai for the remainder of eternity. So this influential and extremely angry lady went and put up this sign to let _everyone _know how she'd been ripped off. As of yet nobody has figured out how to get rid of it. Incidentally this blesses the area with a neverending stream of tourists."

Konata stared at the person who'd walked up to her. Wearing stylish boy's school uniform tailored to fit, but this was clearly a much older man. There was a faint suggestion of him having just climbed some hill, or wheeling a bicycle somewhere, although Konata couldn't quite decide whether he had a bicycle or not.

"I gather from your thought emanations that you're recently dead, am I correct?" he asked. "You probably have a lot to get used to, then. For example, are you familiar with the story of Sisyphus and the stone?"

"You mean the guy who was punished and has to push the stone up the hill?" Konata confirmed.

"Story of my life." the man said. "Only without the stone. Not sure what I'm being punished for, but whenever I go anywhere I keep having to trudge up this endless hill. It gets really annoying when I'm with other people. I'm walking around with friends, and I complain about the hill, just to make small talk, and everyone always looks at me oddly and asks 'what hill?' I think I spent a lot of time trudging uphill when I was alive, too, for no adequately explored reason." he reminisced with evident annoyance. "It can't be something I secretly enjoy, can it?"

"Huh?"

"Sorry. They advised us in the seminar to reassure the newly dead by making casual conversation, but experience is gradually showing that the advice seems to be useless. Even worse than some of the advice I've seen physical humans give social workers on how to prevent suicide. See, without any previous context for two people to communicate, things go all Alice in Wonderland very quickly. I mean you might not even originate from the same sort of physical reality I'm from, or maybe you lived on some planet where they don't even have a concept of 'uphill'..." he started listing off other notions similar to these.

"Hmm..." Konata cut in. "I think what I wanted to know is, what are you supposed to do after you're dead? I thought at least when I died it would be _something_ obvious, like I'd be getting sorted into heaven and hell by a booming voice, but you're actually the first person I met here!"

"Well, I can state honestly that there's nothing you're _supposed _to do here. This is a non-physical plane, so there really are no rules. I mean, you could even go off and create your own pocket universe, although actually convincing people to inhabit it is generally a pain. Just stay out of the way of bigger and more powerful beings than you, but that is just a suggestion since there's no rule against getting in someone's way and having nasty things happen to you. However, for those who stubbornly insist on seeking purpose and validation, the Tourism Bureau in our little neck of the woods has installed this helpful, adaptive directional sign!"

He indicated a signpost with a very large number of signs pointed in all directions, indicating the various afterlives of most of the major Earth religions.

"I guess my main advice would be, don't anticipate anything scary and nothing scary will happen. But you must have a good grasp of this fact to be seeing the signpost in the first place. Most people just get kicked straight through to whatever afterlife they were anticipating themselves to go into."

"Maybe it's because I watch so much anime about afterlives and supernatural things that I wasn't really biased to believe in any specific one!" Konata guessed. "Like in Bleach they have a pretty standard heaven/hell thing, but in Sailor Moon people can theoretically get reincarnated an arbitrary amount of times, whereas in Higurashi there's this variation that..."

The man stared in irritation as the amount of signs on the signpost increased by about ten times in response to Konata's anime references.

"Oh!" Konata remembered. "I actually have a mother who's dead. This is really embarrassing because I should have remembered earlier that I can talk to her now! I mean, I can, can't I? Her name's Izumi Kanata. I should contact her somehow before I decide anything else."

"Yes, certainly." the man in school uniform said, showing her to a phone booth that had conveniently appeared nearby and dialling a number for her. "Although to be honest, I don't see the point of keeping a family in a non-physical reality. Isn't that just some kind of physical, evolutionary adaptation?" he commented as they waited for the dial tone.

"_This is the Integrated Data Authority's long memetic distance phone service._" said an emotionless female voice on the other end.

"Yes, could you please connect us to the sentient being sometimes known as Izumi Kanata?" the man said, looking at Konata.

"Payment. Information."

"Huh?" Konata asked.

"Information is required that is not presently available from the vantage point of the Integrated Data Authority."

The man looked at Konata again, to signal that this was her problem.

"Um..." Konata tried to think of something. "Kobayakawa Yutaka was severely affected by the Fukushima Daiichi incident?"

"No thanks for spoiling the ending to 'Orange Locks'." the voice informed her without any change in intonation. "The information has been immediately purged from the Data Authority's memory banks, as we are currently engaged in consuming that series. Please offer some other spoiler for a series which we are not presently interested in."

"Spoilers, huh?" Konata thought for a minute. "Nigihayama Kohaku Nushi!" she announced.

"Already known."

"Light successfully manipulates Misa's shinigami into murdering L for him!"

"Already known."

"Sailor Moon is reincarnated and everyone's fine at the end of the first season! What a cop out!"

"Already known."

"Gyaah!" In desperation, Konata tried Western media.

"Rosebud is the guy's sled! Darth Vader is Luke's father! Dumbledore dies, Snape kills him!"

"That information is presently available throughout approximately 97.995% of the known multiverse." the voice on the other end explained patiently.

"Just let me pay for you," the man said, taking the headset from Konata.

"... Tsukasa shot Hitler!" he announced unexpectedly.

"Awaiting secondary verification..." the voice answered without skipping a beat. "Oh. Thank you. The information was not previously available from the Integrated Data Authority's vantage point. Now connecting..."

Konata stared at this sudden development. Kyon gave her the handset before she could react.

"Hello?"

A sudden memory overwhelmed Konata.

...

"Please don't die before I do." Sojiro asked her suddenly. For some reason this was a request he made annually of her, always around the same time of year that Kanata had died.

"For now, I have no intention of doing so." Konata said, intent on her game, as usual.

How she'd disappointed everyone...

...

Konata sighed as she was brought back to reality. "Hello? Who is this?" the voice on the other end was asking..

"Hi mom." Konata said. She wasn't sure how to address the person on the other end. They hadn't ever talked, had they? Konata hadn't been old enough yet to have a conversation, or even remember on her own what kind of person her mom was. Just someone she knew from photographs and conversations with her dad.

"Oh! Konata!" her mom sounded happy to hear her. "I never expected a _phone call_, clever girl! How's school? How's Sou-kun? He hasn't been giving you any _hentai_ again, has he? Do you have lots of friends?"

"..." Konata wasn't quite sure where to begin. "... I'm sorry. I was trying to live a good life. I was really careless though! I let myself get hit by a bus! I'm sorry mom, I must have ruined everything for you!" she wailed.

"Oh! Oh, I'm sorry, you must be having a near-death experience in the hospital, right? Well I'm glad you thought to call me right away. Just remember, I always come back every few months to check on my family! Just when you make a full recovery remember to tell me about any troubles you or your friends are having, I'll make sure to think of something..."

"... Mom. I'm kind of dead already." Konata admitted. It felt sort of like a typical household scene where Konata made some mistake in her cooking and was now admitting to putting vinegar instead of oil into the omelet...

"Oh... oh really? That's nice, make sure to have fun then, and still, _please _keep an eye on Sou-kun for me if you can manage it. Try to find _someone_ to take care of him, please? You can even marry him off to someone if you need to, I just don't want to see him sad when I come back in a couple of months. I'm very busy over here, but we should talk when I come back! But I've got to go right now, this Germatoid fellow is very insistent that I teach him to play bridge for some reason... I'm really regretting signing up for such a busy schedule when I passed on... what? Yes, yes, I'm coming..."

"_Thank you for using the Integrated Data Authority's long memetic distance phone service._" the emotionless female voice cut in. "_Please have a very nice rest of eternity._"

Konata hung up the phone listlessly.

"... wait! You're Kyon!" she realized to the older man. "That other person on the phone was Nagato Yuki! Well, I really didn't expect to actually meet you at any point, I suppose I should shake your hand for all the times you saved reality, or ask for an autograph, but I'm not really sure how meaningful the latter gesture would be in a non-physical plane..." she continued breezily to hide the fact that she was being reduced to a drooling fangirl right about now.

"Kyon? Indeed, I am generally referred to by that stupid nickname." Kyon acknowledged after processing what she'd said. "My real name is _. Hmm." he noted as an irritated look crossed his face. "I only just noticed right now that there seems to be a gaping hole in reality where my actual name used to be. _I am going to have words with her about this_." he whispered ominously to himself.

Konata trembled a little with excitement.

"Look, anyhow," Kyon noted, "I'm fairly sure if you need help adjusting you'll be able to find me again. Shouldn't be too hard, since I work with an outfit that seems to magnetically attract anything even remotely interesting around this neck of the woods."

"Yes, thank you very much for your help." Konata was saying, until she realized something else...

"... gyah! Wait! _Tsukasa shot hitler?_ Tsukasa shot **what**?" Konata shouted.

Kyon looked at her curiously. Konata was making no effort to shield her thoughts, and was currently emanating an image of a helpless-looking schoolgirl with a cute ribbon in her hair for all the passers-by to see.

"No, the Tsukasa you're thinking of right now is _definitely _not the type to do that. I was probably referring to something else and by some cosmic fluke the names come out the same way in Japanese." This is why you should switch to non-verbal communication soon, he thought at her. It's going to save you from no end of embarrassment. He frowned. "Also, you should probably work on your facial expressions a little before going out in polite society... you've probably spent too much of your life watching anime..."

Konata stared at her reflection in the phone booth...

"Gyah!"

... and realized that the thing anime characters did where their facial expressions underwent a sudden art shift could also happen in the afterlife. Currently the top half of her head was shrouded in arbitrary shadow with thick shade lines running across it, not quite attached to anything. Her eyes were replaced with featureless circular holes, and her mouth was open in a surprised, pointed triangular shape. Most of the details she was _used _to having on her face were missing. As she looked, a large, single sweatdrop appeared on her forehead and hung from her hair, not quite sure whether to drip or not. Since this was not an anime, it looked severely jarring if you stared at it for too long. She concentrated a little and managed to return to her normal human appearance.

"... so can I go now?" Kyon asked her wearily.

"Ye... Yes!" Konata stammered. "Thank you again for everything."

Wow, she thought as Kyon resumed his weary trudge up the hill, the afterlife is a somewhat amazing place. She still felt somewhat emotionally shellshocked between the conversation with her mom, meeting someone she'd thought was a fictional character, and the sudden way Tsukasa's name had come up like that. And she still wasn't sure what exactly people were supposed to _do _in the afterlife. Somehow following the signpost to some traditional afterlife seemed.. sort of fake. Like she'd be cheating by following some religion she didn't even believe in.

She shook her head a little as though trying to clear water out of her ear. Her imaginary and metaphorical head, she was beginning to realize, but if she had to take the time to qualify everything she saw here as imaginary and metaphorical, she'd waste an entire eternity for no good reason. Best to just go with the flow... and also not mope about the way she'd just destroyed the harmony of her entire family, she decided.

She'd been shaking her head just now... there was a strange feeling that about half of her head was missing, or someone else. But Konata noticed her reflection again in a convenient nearby puddle. She was all there. Wearing her usual school uniform. Blue hair. Had it faded slightly, to a lighter shade of blue? Well, it sort of fit with the fact that Konata was, what, a ghost of some kind now?

It was interesting how things like that puddle just seemed to appear conveniently when she was expecting them and then fade away once she started to ignore them. But unlike most of the other things around here, which seemed to melt away and morph into something else if she just looked at them the wrong way, the sensation in her head was strangely persistent.

As she walked downhill towards the nearby town that Kyon had been coming from, she realized that there were thousands, maybe millions of different awarenesses flitting about, each on their own business and in their own personal world. She hadn't noticed before, because she didn't know any of them, had no reason to attract their attention, nor did they have any reason to care about her. As for the visible parts of the scenery – the rice fields, the town at the foot of the hill, even a train line in the distance, these were all a sort of shared dream among all the people in the place. It wouldn't be too hard to modify the scenery arbitrarily just by forcing one's will on it. It wasn't impossible so much as impolite. Like that lady with the sign in the sky. Although Konata got the sense that if she tried something like that someone would be along to undo the damage in a couple of minutes. The angry medieval lady probably knew some additional trick for putting up signs that stayed there, Konata decided.

Judging by the rice fields and the general style of architecture, this was a part of the afterlife that agnostic modern Japanese people mostly ended up in.

For now she was just going to engage in some tourism in this space. Kyon had mentioned that they got tourists around here, so it must have been a normal thing for dead people to do, right?

She wondered briefly at that tourism comment. The multiverse seemed like a staggeringly big place, if a significant thing such as a signpost to every single afterlife ever imagined on Earth was the provenance of some local government employing people like _Kyon_, and a glittering sign taking up half the horizon was talked about as a purely local nuisance.

* * *

><p>"Your mission, Takara-san, should you choose to accept it, which you are contractually obligated to do, is going to be as a safeguard in the event of our worst case assumption! You must go, observe Legendary Girl A's friends and family, and pay attention to any unusual or improbable events. We will hire other agents to monitor other aspects of reality that she may desire to modify. And together, we will perform our analysis on the resulting data and decide on a further course of action. Anything, no matter how improbable, that could possibly occur in accordance to a story woven by Fanfiction Devouring Spirit must be investigated, as it is the beginning of a corruption that could, as I mentioned before, unravel the very objective integrity of this universe!"<p>

"U.. Understood, sir!" Miyuki said. "I'll do my best!"

* * *

><p>Konata walked through the town. It was an ordinary-looking Japanese town, filled with dead people who were pretending to do the things living people usually did. Dead salarymen drinking imaginary beverages in bars, swapping imaginary complaints about their imaginary workplaces. A nearby high school had a dead cultural festival run by dead people, which allegedly never gave way to an actual school year. People who wanted to pretend to study went to the <em>other <em>high school across town, which never stopped for vacations. At one intersection, Konata found a booth where some dead otaku seemed to be selling doujins.

Konata walked up to the booth and leafed idly through some of the doujins. Well, they were more interesting and well-drawn than the usual stuff, but she just wasn't in the mood right now. Careful not to make eye contact with the salesman or show any sign of approval, both of which could be used to force a sale on her, she put the doujin down and kept walking. She could always come back later. The doujins were interesting, but Konata had other concerns right now.

This world she was in, it all looked convincing enough, but it was obviously just make-believe since nothing was _forcing_ the salarymen to drink or complain or go to work, or the high school students to hold their festivals, or the doujin circle to pour their soul out into doujins. Anyone could just get up and leave here, drifting away to unknown reaches of space-time, and no one else would particularly care. It was all very fake, and not very interesting to Konata.

The people running the place seemed to agree, because every once in a while something strange would happen just to liven things up. There'd be a huge explosion on the horizon, showering the landscape with dollar-store souvenirs and groceries that would be completely cleaned up in the subsequent two minutes. Or a large family would walk past in strange masks, standing out from the crowd, complete with a talking pet cat which was purring along amiably about inconsequential things such as the weather. Or the sound of an argument between two children would escalate improbably into bazooka fire. Since none of these events had any consequences or logic behind them, it was even more depressing to watch than the fake-ordinary life being led in between the events.

Just the way things _looked_, _smelled_, and _felt _was a bit more interesting than all of the above. If you didn't think about it too much, Konata noticed, it was exactly as though she were walking through a real town in real life. But if you paid attention, the thing you were looking at immediately became _hyperreal_. The tiniest details in it would thrust themselves at your attention in a way which details of actual physical objects never did, whereas things in Konata's peripheral vision lost colour, changed, and turned into other things. Similarly it was as though taste, smell, or touch didn't exist until Konata paid attention to them. When she did, her senses would become entirely overwhelmed with the scent of a recent rain, for instance. All of this got old after about 15 minutes, or whatever the equivalent was around here, but time seemed to be another one of those things it was easier just to take for granted instead of worrying about the metaphysical implications.

"Yo-hoo!" the voice of a high school student called to her suddenly. "Are you bored over there?"

Konata looked at her curiously. This was a girl with short light-brown hair. She didn't _look _Japanese. The extremely light brown hair was plausible, but the eyes were too round and her face too open for her to be a Project Yellow. A gleeful look was plastered over the girl's face.

She was with a friend who looked like a very bored, light-skinned Malaysian, had an interesting shade of blue hair which had certainly never been attained by Earth science, and cute twin pigtails done up in pigtail holders which didn't quite fit within the constraints of Euclidean geometry.

The uniform at their school seemed to be centred around having unusually short plaid skirts.

I was wondering when I'd see something weird like that, Konata thought regarding the pigtail holders. I guess people can just look however they want to here, now that I think of it.

"See, I was bored too for a while," the brown-haired girl was lecturing her. "And that was even more depressing because I was a complete failure at life to begin with! Ever since high school! I mean I got _one percent _on an algebra final once! _One percent_! But then I realized the secret..."

"Just ignore her." the Malaysian girl whispered, eyes turning into annoyed slits. "I'm becoming afraid that stupidity is contagious around here."

Konata was relieved to see that she was not the only person in the afterlife whose face could deform severely in that fashion reminiscent of manga and anime.

"... I said THE SECRET! To awesome living!" the brown-haired girl announced, striking a dramatic pose. "... is high stakes tournaments at all times! I mean, living is quite exciting because you could die at any time, but once you're dead the issue no longer applies. Other ideas must be sought after. Other suggestions must be solicited! Other threats must be threatened!"

"Oh, this sounds interesting." Konata noted. "So what's your suggestion?"

The girl grabbed her by the lapels in supplication. "PLEASE PLAY A GAME WITH ME! How about... we have a race... and whoever wins, gets to devour the other person's soul!"

"... wow." Konata said. "You're really that bored?"

"Oy.. oy.. hold on a second.." the Malaysian girl said in a voice that sounded like a forty-year-old woman. It further drove home the point that these were probably people who'd lived long lives and were now pretending to be high school students for nostalgic reasons. "Do you really know how to do that? Are you sure _she _knows how to do that?"

"Of course!" the first girl said brightly. "I devoured hundreds of souls already! Of course you know that I am actually considered somewhat of a dreaded and evil oni of low vibration around here because of that!" she giggled evilly.

"No, I meant the racing part."

"Hmm... I guess it sounds like a fun idea.." Konata said, not really thinking. She was good at athletics, but not sure if this was relevant here, and not certain whether or not this soul-eating business was serious. "However.."

"Okay! We have an agreement!"

"Waugh! Did I just agree to a contest that could devour my soul with some low vibrational oni thing?"

The girl with non-Euclidean pigtails nodded glumly.

The thoroughly wicked grin on the brown-haired girl's face also suggested that this was a serious situation.

"Okay! Anyhow, let's set up a scenario!" the low vibrational oni girl shouted. Without any further transition, the three of them were inside the school, and Konata found herself in the unaccustomed position of holding a notebook of algebra problems that she had completed entirely on her own. It wasn't a bad feeling, actually.

"Now, then. Today I've forgotten how to do my math homework!" the brown-haired girl started to lament suddenly. "... please, oh please, girl with long blue hair, lend me your math homework so that I can copy it!"

"... Okay.." Konata handed over the math homework. "I thought we were having a race?"

"I'm just getting to that! Now as the girl with long blue hair hands over the notebook, she remembers an important detail! Last night, for her own amusement, she drew a yaoi picture within the notebook! A yaoi picture that must not ever be seen by the eyes of another human being, lest she die of eternal shame!"

The girl with pigtails was looking severely peeved at hearing this story.

"Waugh! Truly I remember now that I indeed drew yaoi in the notebook." Konata played along. "I suppose I have to grab it back from you now?"

"Yep!"

"... wow, Yuuko!" the Malaysian girl said, remembering to sound about ten years old this time. "Not only do you have no skill, but also absolutely no imagination when thinking of a scenario!"

Yuuko curled up and began to whimper and shake like she'd just been told her entire family was dead. "Mio-san... that's horrible... what kind of a friend are you?"

"But..." Mio tried to save the situation. "... but... it's all a sacrifice for the development of Yuuko's excellent soul-devouring skills! I believe in your accomplishments, Yuuko! I'm cheering for you to become the evillest, scariest low vibrational being there is!" she turned away to hide her expression at these words.. ".. _someone please resurrect me so I can die now._" she whispered to Konata.

Yuuko brightened significantly on hearing this. "Well, Mio-chan, you don't have to worry about me like that," she said, flustered, "I mean no one's forcing you to follow my progress.. Anyhow, without further ado, let's race!" she shouted without any warning. Konata, fearing for her soul, was forced to take off as well.

"I'm pretty sure there should at least be a long buildup scene before you actually start running like maniacs in the hallway!" Mio shouted after the departing figures. Her efforts were futile, and she ran out into the hall after them.

Everyone else in the classroom resumed diligently trying to ignore the situation.

...

Konata was good at the hundred-meter dash, and reasonable at longer-distance running, but the oni girl was even better. Time seemed to stretch on interminably, but Yuuko seemed to just get faster and faster. Konata thought back to all the other times she'd done athletics.

...

"Wow, how _did _you get so good at the hundred-meter dash?" Kagami was asking.

"It's all in the image! Image!" Konata was saying smugly.

...

She tried the trick from the sports meet earlier on, and looked at the entire scene through the screen of a Gameboy. Push 'A' to run. Push 'A' repeatedly to run faster.

Mash 'A' repeatedly like your soul depended on it, and you would become the champion of the world!

...

She had almost caught up to Yuuko, but even mashing the 'A' button with the aid of a metal ruler was not helping... but there was another image she could use here...

Storyboard artist, if you please! Konata imagined the subsequent series of events in her mind.

She tripped over an eraser on the floor, executed a spectacular and lightning-fast head-over-heels roll down the hallway, ended up in front of Yuuko, leapt up, and snatched the book out of the brown-haired girl's hand!

"Gotcha!" she shouted happily.

"No..." Yuuko cried. "Not this trick again... I suppose this means you get to eat my soul as well..." she wailed. "Well _bon appetit, _I hope you choke on it and die, but I know for a fact you can't die here so I'm just going to sit on the floor and cry until you eat me!"

"Don't worry, I just wanted to have fun, not eat people's souls!" Konata reassured her, somewhat relieved. She'd been afraid she'd disappoint her family even more if her soul ended up being eaten. How did that work, anyways?

"What! But then there wasn't any point to doing the race! There's no use having a contest like that if it wasn't high stakes! I insist you eat my soul now!"

"Huh?" Konata tried to wave Yuuko away.

"Look, shouldn't you be happy that she lets you off so easily?" Mio asked, approaching the two from behind. "You're just beating yourself up for no reason.."

"No! I'm going to chase her until she agrees to eat my soul like she promised to!"

Konata sweated a little. "Seriously, can you just leave me alone?"

"No!"

"I really get the feeling that oni are nothing but trouble..."

"Tell me about it." Mio suggested wearily, also following them outside.

* * *

><p>"Uh... Takahashi-shacho.." Miyuki trembled. "Based on this information you've given me thus far, it seems relevant to tell you that I recently referred Konata to an article regarding a philosophy of thought known as intention-manifestation, which deals with the idea that..."<p>

Takahashi-shacho turned a little pale as soon as he heard the words 'intention manifestation'. "Get me a computer immediately!" he requested.

Upon perusing the article Miyuki found for him, President Takahashi lost all control.

"WHAT! HOW DARE YOU! THE ENTIRE BASIC SUPPOSITION OF MY PREFERRED SCENARIO HAS BEEN THROWN INTO JEOPARDY!" he screamed at the poor girl.

Everyone braced themselves for another long rant.

* * *

><p>Konata breathed with relief. She'd <em>finally <em>managed to shake off the annoying oni named Yuuko and her friend. Now she had some time to think.

It was a bit worrying that just by walking around and not being careful with your words you could stumble into the clutches of a low vibrational being and end up in a contest for your soul. Maybe her soul wouldn't have been eaten (Kyon would have probably warned about something like that), but the term 'mind rape' was beginning to acquire a frightening and realistic sheen for her right now.

It was annoying that stupid remarks just seemed to leap out of your mouth in this place. Konata was beginning to suspect that even if she'd _thought _that the contest was interesting, Yuuko would have seized on that fact and claimed it to be a gesture of agreement. Hadn't Kyon mentioned being able to read her thought emanations?

But even though she'd made the stupid agreement without really meaning to, she'd survived. She had beaten the oni. And all that had taken was her usual image trick. Wait, did that mean her athletic abilities carried over to the afterlife?

No, that was silly. She'd actually been in a reality warping contest of some sort with the oni. Obviously the oni was defining the reality around her so she'd be a good runner. Konata just seized the initiative away and imagined a situation where she won, regardless of how fast Yuuko could run. She hadn't quite escaped the objective constraint provided by Yuuko, but she had made it entirely irrelevant..

It was sounding a bit like that intention-manifestation thing Miyuki had mentioned...

Which meant... _image _was actually the key to the entire notion of intention-manifestation... what you could also call reality warping. It was quite simple really. Maintain an image in your mind of what is going to happen, and that is what will happen. Of course, this was easier said than done – current aspects of your reality would almost inevitably intrude themselves on your image eventually – but Konata had already proven to herself that it could be done. Multiple times, actually.

She stood stunned from the realization.

Her mother had mentioned that Konata should look after 'Sou-kun'... well, that meant her dad.. and even asked her to interfere to make sure someone would be taking care of him if necessary.

All this meant that some people in the afterlife must go into physical reality... and actively influence it... and if Konata was actually already _good _at this kind of thing...

Then she was still in the game. She could still look after Kagami, and see her character development through to the end, and as for congratulating her about it...

Well, she'd figure something out.

Slightly giddy from the sense of possibility now open to her, Konata concentrated briefly, reached through with her mind to the physical world she'd recently departed, and took action.

She wasn't sure what she'd just done, but it felt significant and promising.

* * *

><p>"... this information of yours means we will probably be dealing with at least a class B <em>arbitrary <em>reality warping being at this point..." the President finished wearily.

Class B arbitrary... wait, they had a classification scale?

"Which means.." he growled through his teeth "... that I'm going to require copious amounts of black coffee!" he barked at Miyuki.

"Large matcha latte." Red Shift Manager added without further elaboration.

"Uh..." Tsuruya-san asked. "If it's not too much trouble, could you just bring a green tea for me?"

"Tencho-san?"

"Don't want anything." Green Shift Manager answered.

"All right then..." Miyuki went off to carry out the traditional ritual of coffee-fetching performed by interns the world over.

...

"Now." Takahashi-shacho glinted his glasses at the remaining three people. "There are of course certain measures that I am considering which it would not do for Takara-san to be aware of. Since she has a direct relation to Legendary Girl A's personal life, I'm afraid she would likely be biased against some of them. After our debacle with the 'satanic ritual' I am almost certain she will be. We will thus have to keep in touch by means outside of these meetings."

He tossed each of them a thick manila envelope.

"These contain the necessary details."

...

"I brought the drinks." Miyuki announced as she came back. "It's all been expensed to the division account. It's odd..." she observed. "Starbucks started to give out fortune cookies with their coffee for some reason. I got one for Aoi-Tencho too so he wouldn't feel left out."

Tencho shrugged and opened up his fortune cookie.

**Confucius knows where you live.**

Tencho knocked over a chair as he startled backwards from the cookie. "Well... this is non-standard." he mumbled.

Red Shift Manager opened hers.

**Did you know that, when threatened, the average schoolgirl can generate enough adrenaline to lift a small SUV?**

"How the hell is that relevant to my life?" she asked the thin air and began to sip her latte moodily.

Miyuki cracked open her own cookie.

**Greetings from the afterlife! They got fresh doujins, so exciting!**

"Uh... well..." Miyuki stammered, accomplishing nothing.

Tsuruya-san opened up his own and gaped.

**Is the time right to ask your boss for a raise?**

"No way in hell." Takahashi-shacho cut him off as he unfurled his own fortune.

**1. Nf3 Your turn, Mr. President.**

"I would say this is precisely the kind of improbable event that bears further analysis." Takahashi-shacho concluded after a brief pause. "I think I would like to speak alone with Takara-san at this point. A few pointed and sensitive questions need to be asked.."

* * *

><p>Konata surveyed the immediately visible results of her manifestation. She hoped the shift hadn't <em>killed <em>anyone like last time. Of course, if it had, she'd be meeting the person soon enough, she reflected, so it would be okay.

She was startled to see that an entire castle had arisen to represent her plan. (She hoped she hadn't violated any afterlife zoning regulations with it.) Rows and rows of offices filled with busy-looking people. Some idle spirits who thought that going into a castle and pretending to be accountants was a good bit of fun, it seemed. They could probably be called upon to do real work on a moment's notice. Vaulted, echoing halls stood empty, dual representations of Konata's ambition and the infinite possibility inherent in what they _could _be filled with. A small room, clearly at the center of things, filled with interesting weaponry and artifacts from animes Konata had seen once, and outfitted with ultramodern office equipment. Walls hung with gnarled wax candles and occult symbols, probably for no reason other than to look occult. It was thoroughly amazing when you realized that all of this was dedicated simply to steering the life of Hiiragi Kagami, dedicated schoolgirl who was certainly not at all important in the grand scheme of things. It was all kind of overwhelming. Konata hoped this sudden apparition didn't imply that she had an overly large ego.

Konata frowned at the chessboard set out prominently on the table in the small office at the center of things. She seemed to be playing the white pieces against someone. Who else would be interested in what she was doing? she wondered. And anyhow, chess? That somehow didn't suit the picture. It brought to mind some brooding bishonen with a dark past plotting to do twisted, morally ambiguous things, not a gleeful otaku about to have some fun with newly acquired cosmic powers!

She closed her eyes, concentrated for a moment. After opening them she was satisfied to see that there was a board on the table set out for the game of Go. She'd been given a whole five-stone advantage at the beginning, which suggested that her opponent hadn't even started to play the game before Konata set things in motion. Well, in the end it would probably turn out to be some odd metaphor for what remained of Konata's insecurities.

She studied her move and realized that there was one aspect in Kagami's coming character development she hadn't thought about. Who would be the _tsundere_'s eventual love interest? No ordinary man could be trusted. In order to trust the outcome, she'd have to pick someone she knew already. She went over the candidates in her mind. No, not very promising. Choosing a love interest for Kagami was frustratingly difficult... so different from working based on a story where you know _everything _there is to know about the character...

Well, she had to try _someone_. And of course, given the way that shipping worked, she was only going to get one try, wasn't she? This was not going to something you handle just by placing a stone, was it?

Konata gasped as she remembered a detail from her favourite anime. She'd never guessed that 'The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya' would become so directly relevant to her life. Or her death, anyways. Or maybe she had, maybe that had been the reason for her to like it in the first place!

Wandering over to a deserted room of the castle, she found a wardrobe stocked with every imaginable kind of Japanese school uniform. She'd just got an interesting idea for a cosplay...

* * *

><p>Dual presences curiously observed Konata's haphazard preparations.<p>

"Oh. Oh dear. She's going to do something stupid, isn't she?" one noted drily.

The other presence squealed with excitement. "Oh my God!"

"Huh? Is that really an appropriate thing for you to be saying?"

"_Jesus Christ on a cracker!_ _That's just a turn of speech! _And I'm certain that no lesser being is sufficient to express my excitement at what's happening. At this rate she's likely to commit the very first arrestable offense on my plane of reality! I can't wait to handcuff her!"

"You do remember that's not how arrest works in a non-physical realm, I hope?"

"Of course I do! You overwhelm the offender by projecting an alternate perspective on their actions, their soul crumples and you can drag them off to court. Simplest thing in the world! Now if we get this over with immediately..."

"And you _do _remember that you won't be able to do anything until she's actually committed an offense? Because frankly I think that nothing's going to happen and she's going to spend the next fifty years bashing her head against reality, just like the last few people who attempted this kind of thing."

"But this is going to be so much more annoying to deal with later if she does manage to... but she's... oh _fine_, but you're always the one to ruin my day with observations like that. I was really hoping I'd get to arrest someone by now! I don't know why I even put up with your guff at this point!"

"We've been together for what, over five thousand incarnations _at this point_? This is rapidly becoming a question of existential philosophy." the first presence noted.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Notes: <strong>Before anyone gets confused, this fanfic takes place in an alternate history in which Adolf Hitler was never a prominent historical figure. World War II still took place between the United States and Japan, although nuclear weapons were not used at any point. That is all. As for Pope Urban X, I'll leave you with Voltaire's explanation:

_Notice how exceedingly discreet our author is. There has so far been no Pope called Urban X. He hesitates to ascribe a bastard to an actual Pope. What Discretion! What a tender conscience he shows!_


	4. COPOUT OMAKE  Yuuko eats her first soul

People tuning in to 'Ten Percent Worth Dying For' this week were very surprised to see it begin with a Lucky Channel logo.

(_Lucky Channel_.) the hyperactive but always (_okay, who writes these things?_) fun and pleasant TV idol Kogami Akira announced listlessly. (_Right, uh..._)

"... welcome to another episode of Lucky Channel! Your navigator Kogami Akira here..." she resumed brightly.

"... and loyal assistant Shiraishi Minoru at her service!" Shiraishi Minoru was holding several sheets of paper. "Uh... Arakawa-san, that is the author, has asked us to tell you that there will be a delay in the posting of the next chapter."

"Long story short, we're here to provide you with unmitigated filler!"

"Arakawa-san says," Shiraishi read from his papers, "that despite the title containing the name of the character Tsukasa there is as of yet insufficient Tsukasa-related content in the chapter, and so an additional week will be required to..."

"... Seriously? That's his excuse?" Akira wondered.

"Ap..parently so."

(_Why did we sign up to do this?_) Akira wondered. "Anyhow, we have recruited two of our minor supporting characters to tell you a little bit more about themselves!"

Two schoolgirls appeared, following their cue. One had short brown hair and a stupid wide-open grin. The other, blue hair done up in short pigtails whose non-Euclidean nature wasn't quite visible on camera. After striking matching dramatic poses, they announced that they would be putting on a short play.

Akira stood to one side watching the girls with barely-concealed annoyance while Shiraishi fidgeted nervously beside her.

* * *

><p><strong>Cop-Out OMAKE 1 – How Yuuko Ate Her Very First Soul<strong>

Standard Disclaimer: fanfiction consists of derivative works written by fans who wish to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them! Please support the creators of the original works referenced in this fanfic, particularly Lucky Star and (in this case) Nichijou.

Two very disoriented souls were beached on the unfamiliar shores of unreality, a common enough occurrence throughout the multiverse.

"Great." one of the souls was saying to the other bitterly. "You must be the first person on the planet to shoot yourself in the face with a particle accelerator."

"No..." the other sobbed. "Not even the first! I FAIL AT EVERYTHING! I read once that there was this other guy once who I think was replacing a magnet when they accidentally turned the beam on.. but he survived! I mean he went blind in one eye and the hair fell off half his head and..." it blubbered.

"I'm not in the mood to hear about it, Yuuko."

"I mean I didn't even get to shoot myself with the main coil! Just some lousy secondary storage ring.."

They were two European women, both dressed in some kind of technician's overalls. One was a dark-haired lady with the kind of severe, perpetual frown that came with a lifetime of trying to get electronics to do things they weren't feeling inclined to do. The other, slightly unfocused eyes and a normally pleasant expression except in extraordinary circumstances. Death certainly counted as such.

The place they were in felt like the bottom of an overgrown swamp. A dim murk concealed their surroundings, seeming to muffle all of the senses and making their speech sound like they were underwater.

"Is this all there is?" Yuuko sobbed. "We just sit here for the rest of eternity. Mio. I'm sorry I had to drag you here with me!"

Mio, the dark-haired one, looked around uncertainly and became aware of the presence of other frightened souls around them, hidden somewhere in the murk. All the lamentations resonated with each other unpleasantly, producing a persistent, dull burbling throughout the place. Making it difficult for her to even think straight.

Disconcertingly, the other souls seemed to notice Mio as well.

A schoolgirl in Japanese uniform bobbed nearby, like an annoying puppy who refused to go away.

"_You_ think _you_ have it bad." she told Yuuko accusingly. She then launched into a loud, selfish rant about her own life and all of the things _she'd _done wrong and how _she'd _ended up dead, which Yuuko didn't quite attend to.

"Sorry, I'm dozing off here, how did you die again?"

"Suicide."

"... oh." Yuuko wasn't sure if she was obligated to feel even worse than she already was about this.

"Not a good listener, are you?"

"And you're even stupider than I am. Suicide at your age, seriously?"

"What does age have to do with it? And anyhow." the schoolgirl started crying, which somehow made her look extremely ugly. Not that she wouldn't have looked presentable if she hadn't just spent eternity feeling entirely miserable about herself. "I was hoping it would all be over! But it's just this endless swamp! I'm so tired... I'm so lonely... I don't want to be me anymore."

"THEN FIGURE SOMETHING OUT!" Yuuko screamed angrily at the girl, causing her to waver as though uncertain of her own existence. "In case you haven't noticed, everyone else here has their own problems to deal with. If you're going to follow me around at least be quiet about it!"

The schoolgirl had vanished by this point.

Yuuko hung her head, overwhelmed with a sudden memory.

"Mio," she began, "do you remember the time I wrote an algebra exam and I only got one percent on it..."

Mio sighed. Was _she _going to get a turn to complain about _her own_ bad memories?

"... and felt so bad about it I lied to my friends about it and then I felt even worse and you snatched the paper out of my hand and saw the real mark ..."

"Yuuko. I don't think anything like that ever happened to you."

Staring at Yuuko, Mio was surprised to see her hair turn a slightly darker shade.

"You were with me since grade school! You should remember!"

"I've never been to grade school with you. WE MET AT UNIVERSITY! And I'm fairly sure they wouldn't be letting you anywhere near the Large Hadron Collider if you failed basic algebra that badly!" Mio protested.

Was Yuuko slightly shorter now?

"You're right." Yuuko agreed. "It's not something even worth remembering! I don't deserve to be remembered anyhow... it's not like I deserve to be famous for doing something this stupid when other people work so hard to be well-known.."

Hadn't she been wearing a technician's uniform before this?

Mio stared. Yuuko was rapidly changing into a procession of schoolgirls of various shapes, sizes, and states of mental distress.

"Yuuko! What's going on! Where are you?"

The latest schoolgirl in the series screwed up her face in intense concentration, stabilizing her shape into a not-quite-distressed variant.

The girl floating there now was entirely the wrong age – somewhere around sixteen, looking almost but not quite like schoolgirl that had bothered them earlier. She had the same expression as the older Yuuko, but a completely different face. It was like how the Japanese drew themselves in their anime cartoons, Mio decided, looking Western or even not-quite-Western, but certainly not Japanese.

"Well, that was... interesting." Yuuko observed her new face calmly in a pocket mirror that suddenly appeared in her hand.

"WAH!" Mio shouted. "Where did you get that?"

Yuuko ignored her, instead concentrating on the mirror and making minimal adjustments so that the old Yuuko became visible in this younger girl's face. She put the mirror away, looking significantly happier.

"This is getting seriously weird... can you change back to your normal age?" Mio asked her hopefully.

"Why should I? You should try this too, Mio!"

"No. This is messed up. This place must be trying to make you forget who you are."

"Come on, it's not like there's anything else to do here! Our lives are over already."

"Wait! I just realized something." Mio said. "Mio isn't even a French name! Neither is Yuuko! We don't even remember our proper names already!"

"Seriously, who cares about this?" 'Yuuko' asked her.

"Can you remember having a last name or anything?" 'Mio' shouted in panic.

"Look, who cares?" Yuuko gestured widely with her hands. "Nobody! At least lighten up, you're getting me down with your attitude again. As if that depressed schoolgirl wasn't enough." She shuddered. "I can still hear her voice in the back of my head! I have this feeling like I've been yelled at for an hour for something I didn't even do!"

Mio was ignoring her, instead pointing out something above them.

A very ordinary hand was being proffered to them out of the vague murk.

"Hand." a clogged-sounding female voice said by way of explanation.

Mio shrugged and immediately grabbed the hand. Yuuko gaped for a while after she was whisked somewhere upwards and out of sight. They'd been separated! How would Yuuko find her again?

Somehow the fact that Mio ended up following her everywhere had been the one constant in her life recently, for some strange reason, even if she absolutely detested Yuuko as a person... and now this... she flailed around in a panic.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER! ..."

There was an audible _sigh _as the hand returned. "Just take the hand already. We don't have all night to do this."

* * *

><p>The place they were pulled into looked like a paper-mache cutout of a street. Unreal stairs, houses, made mostly of old newspaper clippings advertising various psychological therapies. Harsh fluorescent lightning came from above, and coloured everything in the same unpleasant blue tinge as the swamp, but at least it felt dry and clear here.<p>

Yuuko was startled to see that the owner of the hand was their supervisor, Professor Mai. (The last name slipped her mind for some reason.) A severe raven-haired woman, with an unforgettably clogged voice that made it seem like she had a perpetual head cold. The frequent invitations she received to give talks at neighbouring universities were generally seen as a played-out interdepartmental prank. It was cruelty to make her give talks with that kind of voice and cruelty to make people listen to her. Nevertheless, she was also respected as an irreplaceable expert on certain technical aspects of the LHC's custom equipment. On top of that strange and varying rumours circulated behind her back that she was psychic, or a synaesthetic, or secretly lesbian, or had an IQ of 300, or maybe she was clairvoyant, or perhaps had a photographic memory, or that her long hair was actually a wig, or some nonsense like that. Yuuko couldn't even remember now.

"You people invent the most awful places to end up in." Professor Mai was saying.

"... Mai! Don't tell us you're dead, too!" Yuuko exclaimed as she realized the implications.

Mai adjusted her glasses.

"No." she said, pointing to an advertisement that read MAKE MONEY WHILE YOU SLEEP in large letters. "Psychopomp. Night job."

By way of further explanation she held up the book she was reading. It was titled _Operating __Parameters of Extremely Large Electromagnets_.

"Sleep learning." she stated simply.

They stared at each other for what felt like five minutes.

Mio finally managed to close her mouth. Somehow this felt extremely unfair. She was remembering why exactly Professor Mai (again, was that the woman's real name?) and she never talked to each other. Mai was pleasant enough so long as she kept her mouth closed. When she spoke, it was mostly to demonstrate exactly how the other person had made a fool of themselves.

The only reason they were even (loosely) acquainted outside of Mai's role of supervising them and a hundred other technicians was because Yuuko had some bizarre inferiority-admiration complex for Mai and insisted on asking the professor out for coffee at every opportunity. Strangely, Mai would acquiesce and sit there quietly while Yuuko's side of conversation got more and more bombastic and inane. Mio would also keep quiet, observing the trainwreck but having no idea what she could do, or why she'd even come along this time. Eventually Mai would open her mouth and make both of them feel like idiots for having wasted her time with trivialities. Two weeks later, the entire process would inevitably repeat itself.

"So what happens next?" Mio brought up the courage to ask.

"Train." Mai announced, pointing them in the direction to the station. Somehow she made even the notion of their taking a train seem like a topic of derision.

At some point while they were walking to the train station Mai imitated Yuuko in changing to a barely-recognizable school-aged version of herself. Mio frowned at this.

"Take the hint." Mai told her, in a much younger but still clogged-sounding voice. "At this point clinging to your previous identity will simply weigh you down psychologically."

Mio stolidly refused to turn into anything she wasn't at this point.

As they arrived in front of the station, Mai took out a clipboard and considered it with unusual concentration.

"Let's see... train passes for _two_ people.. psychological counselling tickets for _three_ people."

"Mai, didn't you say you weren't dead yet? Why do we need three tickets?" Mio asked.

"Three people." She pointed to Mio. "One." She pointed to Yuuko. "Two, three."

"HEY! Are you saying I'm messed up enough for two people?" Yuuko protested.

Mai tilted her head to one side, considering this question for a moment. Her eyes seemed to focus on something just behind Yuuko. "Good point," she conceded, "both of you are messed up enough for two people. Thank you, Yuuko. I'll make sure to write out tickets for five people, then."

"Don't you mean four people?" Mio shouted.

"No. Then you would be left without a counselling ticket." Mai said. "Two train tickets and five counselling tickets. Final offer."

"Five people, huh." Mio wondered. "Two people, times doubly-messed up, that's one, two, ... three..." she stared at her fingers, which seemed to swim and multiply oddly before her very eyes. "..."

She stopped, a blank look of confusion in her face.

"This is not a dimension well-adapted to discrete computation. Trust me, it takes me a lot of time to count things here as well."

"Look, what is this nonsense? Two times two doesn't make five, at least I can remember that!"

"Two times two does not make five." Mai conceded. "Two times two plus one, however..." she trailed off.

"Where does the one come from?" Mio wailed. Mai pointed to her again by way of explanation.

Yuuko looked scandalized at this exchange. "And you call yourself a scientist!" she yelled at Mai.

"_Look_." Mai said, a sudden harshness in her voice. "You're trying my patience. You realize that there's going to be a memorial service in your honour when I wake up today and I'm going to have to sit there and pretend to like you people? Please don't make that difficult for me. Just take the damn tickets and get inside."

* * *

><p>The station itself seemed like the designer had taken every single time a tourist had ever been confused in a train station anywhere in the world and sort of mashed all of these impressions together.<p>

"... well, this is only slightly more disorienting than the New York Subway." Mio finally offered as she stared at the map.

The layout of the train network itself wasn't the biggest issue. In the end, the map was made truly incomprehensible by the tiny print that made a truly heroic attempt to explain various notable locations in the afterlife, overlapping maps of fare zones and actual geographic areas, and a number of other things that looked like rivers but weren't explained very well.

They offered up their tickets to the faregate and went through them nervously – _into the jaws of hell_ – Mio thought for some reason.

"Mai, what about your ticket?" Yuuko asked uncertainly.

Even Mai wavered, but finally managed to locate the station they were supposed to go to for counselling on the map and the platform from which to board. She strolled through the faregate calmly without needing to offer it anything.

"Welcome. This train service is for those who are unable or unwilling to unable to engage in unaided long-distance travel. Many people have difficulty traversing regions of unpleasant affect without attracting unwanted interference from low-vibrational entities." a pleasantly-accented voice announced as they got on the train and it started moving. "Therefore, this convenient, vibrationally isolated train service has been sponsored jointly by the Target Army and the Neocameralist Government of Perth, Australia."

"The _what _government of _what_?" Mio asked, confused.

She did a double-take as Mai seemed to have taken up a position on the luggage rack. There was no one besides them on the train to see it, but it was still sudden and embarrassing.

Mai gave her a look as though it was Mio who was embarrassing her by acting surprised.

"Carry-on luggage." she pointed to herself. "As for the Neocameralist Government of Perth, Australia: active research program into the Beyond. Jointly sponsored a train service with the Target Army."

"I gathered that much from the announcement..." Mio signed wearily and looked at the two teenage-seeming people in the train with her. "I'm never going to get used to this... by the way, we can't even seem to remember our names. Would you happen to know anything about this, Mai?"

Mai pointed to Yuuko.

"Target Army judged the likelihood of a haunting at the Large Hadron Collider to be very high in her case. This may introduce inconsistencies into the LHC experiment, causing broader instability in environmental data. I agreed with the assessment. Therefore names have been confiscated to produce spatiotemporal disorientation and prevent a haunting. This is an unusual measure."

The story was interrupted by an angry, spluttering voice.

* * *

><p>(<em>ALRIGHT!<em>) Kogami Akira shouted. (_WE GET THE PICTURE!_ _The author hasn't prepared anything of substance this week, so he's just free-associating about the afterlife hoping we swallow it! We don't __need this to go off track and turn into some irrelevant Nichijou fanfiction! EXIT STAGE LEFT PLEASE!_) she shooed the three girls away.

"Uh... Akira-sama.."

(... _this is going to be deleted once there's an actual chapter to post, right?_) Akira asked Shiraishi, suddenly realizing she was on camera.

"I... don't know." he answered. "Actually, I think it depends on Akira-sama's audience appreciation rating."

Upon hearing the term 'rating' Akira immediately regained her normal stage presence.

"Oh! Well then, it looks like that's all for today! Hopefully next week I will be able to take my rightful place presiding at the end of a chapter containing significant substance!~~" she yelled cheerfully.

"Until next time, then." Shiraishi added.

"Bye-bee!"

* * *

><p>"Next week: The chapter <em>in which Tsukasa runs head-first into the elusive Fifth Wall!<em> Look forward to it!"


	5. Tsukasa and the Fifth Wall

**Ten ****Percent ****Worth ****Dying ****For ****Season**** 1: ****This ****Universe ****is ****Experiencing ****Technical ****Difficulties**

**Chapter**** 4**, in which Tsukasa runs headfirst into the elusive Fifth Wall

Standard Disclaimer: fanfiction consists of derivative works written by fans who wish to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them! Please support the creators of the original works referenced in this fanfic, particularly Lucky Star.

Shiraishi Minoru found working as an MC for 'The Jam of Suzumiya Haruhi' to be a relaxing change of pace from his usual abuse at the hands of burned-out Lucky Channel host Kogami Akira. Not that Akira-sama didn't have a good reason to dislike him. Trying to make it as a television personality while still in high school? It was one thing if your parents forced you into it as a child actor, and yet another thing when you tried to do it on your own initiative as he had. An insane idea, Shiraishi would be the first to agree, yet he was doing it.

He'd squeaked by into the glittering and stressful world of show business because his seeming awkwardness and absolute outward lack of charisma made him absolutely indispensable in a certain niche. What was the number one thing people said when seeing him on TV?

"So I guess this means people actually go for that kind of thing? ... Wow."

Yet for Shiraishi Minoru, being 'that kind of thing' meant a steady trickle of gainful employment. Difficult to explain to someone not in the know.

Now that it was finally over, he had the usual feeling he got from concerts. The one where you don't want to talk to anyone or do anything, just sit quietly somewhere and reflect on your life and the beauty of creation when it's not being disturbed by concert floodlights, wondering what exactly this feeling you're experiencing is... but you also know that as a bit player in show business you don't stop running around even once the fans have gone home, and you're actually looking forward to a late night of all kinds of irrelevant nonsense.

He was interrupted from his reverie by, of all people, the lead singer at the concert. Both a voice actress and a music idol – in Japan the two fields intersected with regularity – she was rumoured to be trying to get out of the voice acting business as soon as she could manage it.

"Shiraishi, is it? Sorry to bother you, but you looked like you're not doing anything. Can you pass on a message to my manager?"

Shiraishi briefly considered whether this could somehow be turned into a career opportunity.

"There's a dinner scheduled tonight, but I'm not going to that. I have a hankering to get on the train back to Osaka several hours earlier." she explained.

"Not my place to say this," Shiraishi permitted himself to ask, "but is it all right for you to skip an event like that?"

"I don't know," the singer said with mild exasperation, "I'd just be the decoration at someone else's business dinner. Look, you can tell him, I mean, North High is based off a real school, right? I voiced an entire season without even seeing the place once! I may as well have a look at it."

"... Very well, Hirano-san," Shiraishi answered. Didn't all high schools look more or less the same? "I'll make sure he knows." It was obviously an excuse. Still, not his business.

"I can't believe some of the stuff this studio is making me do! They're going to re-film and re-broadcast the exact same episode _eight __times _for some reason. What is the point? Well, have a nice day."

Another lucky voice actress who's got it made, Shiraishi thought to himself as she departed. I wish I could skip irrelevant business functions just like that. Would make juggling school and work much easier.

Still, was it really Hirano-san's style to do this? He was fairly sure he'd have heard rumours of it by now if she made a habit of casually skipping out on her schedule like this. And from the way she held herself, she seemed like a normally diligent person...

* * *

><p>Without Konata there to drag them to some anime concert, Kagami, Tsukasa, and Miyuki had elected to go flower watching earlier that day. Yutaka came along as well, so their number was again four.<p>

"I just felt bad about putting it off till the last day." Kagami was lecturing the other girls. "Which is why we're doing this today when they're still in full bloom."

"Yeah," Tsukasa added, "if you put it off till the last day, it starts raining, or the petals start to fall..."

Yutaka was smiling. Even though the chilly spring air was making her lungs feel a bit scratchy, she was determined to enjoy this for as long as she could manage.

Miyuki was staring in front of her tensely, as though nerving herself for something. She finally turned around and began speaking.

"Everyone, I'm very sorry to bring this up while we're flower-watching, but I owe you an explanation." she said uncertainly. "I... I'm grateful you haven't asked me anything so far, but I think I'm finally ready to explain myself, and I've kept you waiting long enough."

Yutaka looked a bit confused.

"... I suppose it wouldn't hurt for Kobayakawa-san to hear this as well." Miyuki commented on Yutaka's presence. She proceeded to recount how she'd been gradually convinced to indulge Takahashi-shacho's strange fixation on Konata and spy on her friends, and explained the (mundane contents of) Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction. She left out as much of the whole supernatural prophecy aspect of the business as she could manage.

"... and now he says I'm supposed to report anything odd that happens to you from now on! I'm so sorry that I was even telling him anything before this!" she bowed her apology, nearly bursting into tears with embarassment.

Yutaka was still a little confused over what the big deal here was.

"Well, it could have been worse." Kagami stated icily after hearing Miyuki out. "They could have brainwashed you into thinking high-frequency stock trading is a good idea, for one thing."

Tsukasa looked somewhat shocked. First onee-chan getting into a fight, then Miyuki-san turning out to be some kind of weird market research spy...

"... flower-watching is actually not that bad an occasion to get things like that off your chest." Kagami added a bit more warmly. "It really is a bit of an awkward situation for everyone, though."

Yutaka excused herself shortly afterwards, saying that this was about as long as she could stay out in the breezy air and that she needed to get home to start cooking dinner anyways, and apologized that she wasn't able to enjoy the sight with them longer.

The rest of them ended up staying out until late that evening, determined to talk only about things more pleasant than Miyuki's job.

* * *

><p>Getting home, Yutaka found her uncle in quite a state.<p>

"Yugh, I'm coming down with hayfever." Sojiro lamented through his handkerchief. "And my skin always gets delicate this time of year. I get a really brutal time of it..."

"Uh, I have spare masks and allergy cream and stuff upstairs." Yutaka offered. "I get reactions to odd things sometimes. Just today I found out I have problems with cherry blossoms."

She coughed a little.

"I really should have taken a mask with me today, actually." she wheezed.

Gleefully accepting one of Yutaka's allergy masks, Sojiro made a series of dramatic gestures and shouted HENSHIN! in a deep voice. Yutaka just barely recognized this as an imitation of Kamen Rider.

"Wow, you look pretty cool!" she said upon seeing Sojiro put on the mask and a pair of goggles.

"You think?" he asked. "Blocks 99% of all pollen! I can finally go to convenience stores in the spring!"

"Have fun!" Yutaka called brightly as he departed to do just that.

Upon turning on the TV she discovered that around this time of year, there were a lot of convenience store robberies being performed this month by people disguised in allergy masks.

"Oh. Oops." Yutaka said. "I guess I should run after him and warn him to take the mask off before he goes into the actual store.."

She put on a mask of her own just in case she ended up reacting to something else outside and hurried out.

Which is how they ended up in the street with Narumi Yui pointing a leek threateningly at both of them. She'd been just on her way to visit their house.

"Freeze, you highly suspicious persons."

"Yui-neesan, it's just me and Uncle Sojiro!" Yutaka shouted desperately.

Yui-neesan was startled to hear Yutaka's voice coming from the short person with the mask. "Yucchan, you look _scary _in that mask! Take it off immediately!"

* * *

><p>At her own house, Kagami fed the pet goldfish in the backyard pond an ample meal.<p>

The monstrously obese creature thrashed about in an obvious plea for even more food.

"What are you, a bulimic?" Kagami snapped at it. "That's all you're getting today!"

Looking at her sister, Tsukasa wondered what was going on.

Kagami turned around and said something about it not being polite to listen in on people's private conversations.

"Uh..." Tsukasa said from the opposite direction Kagami was looking in. "Onee-chan, I'm over here. I'm sorry for listening."

"Oh." Kagami turned around again. "No, it's all right. This goldfish is driving me out of my wits. Did you know, I honestly thought you were in that direction."

"Can this thing even properly be called a goldfish?" Tsukasa wondered, indicating the blubbery mass thrashing about in the pond.

* * *

><p>"Why are we taking such an interest in minor incident reports from northern Tokyo?" a hapless yakuza wondered.<p>

The others looked towards the head of the table nervously. But then again, if one of their number was looking for trouble like this, why not just let him do it?

"You want to try your luck with me?" a young girl's voice whispered. "You're feeling lucky? I've chewed up bigger thugs than you and spit them out when they disagreed with me. You feeling up for a disagreement?"

He found himself looking into the girl's face. There was insanity in those eyes.

"Ah, here we go." she said suddenly, holding up a recent incident report. "That makes two incident reports like this. Same alley, same lucky schoolgirl, same drunken salaryman who suddenly decides he's a molester and gets sent home with his tail between his legs. This means..."

There was a pause.

"What does it mean?" one of the people at the table asked in a small voice.

"... it's exactly the sort of thing I'm instructed to look for!" she said cheerfully. "I think we should go and make sure there's a third incident report. It's more fun when things come in threes, don't you think?"

Everyone else around the table sighed internally. Ever since this girl had come out of nowhere and stongarmed their clan into obeying her slightest wishes, productivity had fallen in every meaningful sense of the word. Now they'd be embroiled in some nonsensical operation in Tokyo, far outside their home turf.

* * *

><p>"Hello, Hiiragi residence. Yes. Oh hi! What's up? … What did you just say? SERIOUSLY? You actually did your homework? I can't believe it! … WHAT? Grrr... so you called me just to play this stupid prank." Kagami's voice was saying. "No, you're planning something? That's frightening on so many levels... Well, see you whenever."<p>

"Unnhh... guess I have to get up now." Tsukasa murmured. Extricating one hand from under the cover she grabbed her clock and discovered that it was 11:11am.

"Yeeh!" she shouted. "I didn't mean to sleep in that late!"

She stumbled downstairs, still in her favourite pajamas, an article of clothing chosen specifically to be acceptable for lounging about breakfast late in the morning when you were too lazy to change into actual clothes.

"Good morning onee-chan." Tsukasa said, stumbling downstairs. "Who were you talking to on the phone just now?"

"..." Kagami said, her face blank. "... sorry, we didn't leave you any breakfast."

"Hmm?"

"This is somewhat strange..." Kagami murmured as Tsukasa began to cook herself breakfast on autopilot. "Who was I talking to just now? It was just some April Fool's joke from someone..." she trailed off uncertainly.

"Whatever." the younger twin replied, fiddling with a frying pan. Yes, cooking breakfast for her was easier than putting on proper clothes. "Oh, right, it's April Fool's day today."

"You have any pranks planned, Tsukasa?"

"Yep." Tsukasa affirmed. "Sure have."

Kagami tried to picture Tsukasa engaged in lying and trickery of any sort. It was difficult – Tsukasa was just too easy to read.

"I pranked you just now." her twin sister giggled. "I didn't actually have anything planned."

"... that's kind of confusing." Kagami said. "Just don't feel any pressure to prank anyone!"

Hiiragi Tadao, the Hiiragi family patriarch, wandered into the room at this point. He was looking forward to a quiet day today.

"Oh, Tsukasa, good morning. Did you sleep well?" he asked.

"I overslept again. I had this really weird dream about some oni banging on the doors of a castle, except the oni was also a schoolgirl..."

"That's nice. Sleeping in like this all the time kind of worries me, though." he answered, listening to something with a frown. "... damn tanuki is making a racket on the roof again."

Kagami looked at him oddly. "I can't hear anything."

"No, you probably can't. Still, we shouldn't let it tear up our roof." he thought for a minute before fetching a broom. "Odd, you usually don't get tanuki this far into the city. I'm going to try to get it to leave."

Alone with Kagami again, Tsukasa considered her cooking breakfast. "Onee-chan, have you by any chance pranked anyone today yet?"

"No, I haven't. What made you think that?"

"Well, that phone call before. It sounded like one of those conversations you always used to have with Kona-chan. Except you couldn't actually be talking to her so you were just pretending."

"No, what kind of stupid prank would that be? It would be in terrible taste for one thing.."

"Okay... who were you talking to, then?"

"..."

"Who else do we know that slacks off on their homework…" Tsukasa wondered inquisitorially. "... maybe it was Kusakabe-chan?"

"..." Kagami tried to remember, her face turning slightly blue with the effort.

"Never mind," Tsukasa sighed, tucking into her fried eggs. "I guess this is one of those really long and elaborate pranks that's going to last the entire day, isn't it?"

* * *

><p>"I don't think I'll be going to that spring dance tonight." Kagami said suddenly, looking up from her novel. "My hair still feels frizzy from swim practice, it's going to be weird dancing like that."<p>

The two of them were sitting in Tsukasa's room, killing some time over tea.

"I thought you have to stuff your hair into a bathing cap in order to keep it out of your way while swimming?" Tsukasa asked. "Shouldn't it stay dry?"

"_Yes__._" Kagami answered. "But the water leaks inside and then it just feels like your head is jammed into a wet bucket. Besides which, my hair dye ends up interacting with the chlorine on a regular basis... I sometimes end up having to re-dye it right in the showers. Kind of difficult to manage."

Tsukasa's eyes lit up. "I really want to see what it looks like before you re-dye it!"

"_No_." Kagami said firmly. "It's honestly hideous. I mean, the dye lasts fine for two or three practices, but then things start to get ugly."

"Hmm..." Tsukasa thought. "I guess it wouldn't just wash right out, but turn strange colours... I should try swimming three days in a row and see how it looks like, I wonder why swimming pool chorine would have that kind of effect... did you try a different type of dye?"

"I don't know," Kagami said, "ask the pharmacy, they know what brands it's blended from. You'd have to try to get them to change the mixture somehow. Our dad sure picked an unusual colour for us.."

"If it becomes too much of a problem," Tsukasa considered, "you could always just stop dyeing your hair.."

"Would be kind of hard on dad, though." Kagami countered. "I mean we were born a long while after the coloured-hair experiments got shut down, so it makes him feel better to pretend that his children are all Project Whatevers with the hair dye. I don't think the government ever approved actual lavender-coloured hair."

"Hmm.." Tsukasa wondered. "If we were actual Project Lavenders, I mean we wouldn't be the same people we actually are... since the procedure entails genetic modification... but would that actually make us different people?"

"I can sort of see what your point is..." Kagami said.

"And that's not counting the different personality traits we'd end up with."

"I guess.." Kagami concluded sadly. "I think they ended up making too much of a fuss over coloured-hair personality problems. I mean, we know several people with more or less undiluted coloured hair genes... I guess Miyuki fits the stereotype for her hair colour... but Konata was practically the opposite of what you'd expect a Project Blue to be like. Besides being short, of course."

"I think that's called neoteny." Tsukasa commented. "When one subspecies looks like a really young version of another subspecies. Like how dogs look mostly like really young wolves."

"Really?" Kagami asked thoughtfully. "Now that I think about it, it really is the same phenomenon."

It felt a bit awkward for both of them to be talking about Konata in this fashion. How she was short for a reason, and the reason was that some geneticists thought it might be cool to test their skills on breeding Japanese people with blue hair. But that was more or less the truth of this particular matter.

"It's possible to get neoteny just by doing artificial selection." Tsukasa said uncertainly. "Like that experiment with the silver foxes in Siberia."

"You're kind of knowledgeable about this stuff." Kagami noted acerbically. "Why aren't your biology grades higher, then?"

Tsukasa smiled awkwardly. "I only found out about the silver foxes because they looked really cute to have as a pet, then I did some more reading on how the researchers did it..."

They were called downstairs at this point to get ready to leave.

"Like I said, I'm not going." Kagami announced to her family: mother, father, Tsukasa, and two older sisters.

"Are you sure you don't want to?" her older sister Matsuri pleaded. "Tsukasa, you too, make sure you actually try dancing with someone this time!"

It was decided that Kagami would stay and watch the house, while everyone else would go and have fun at the dance.

* * *

><p>Tsukasa didn't really have much to do at the spring dance. There was a slightly obnoxious dance instructor in the plaza outside who was quite willing to teach the necessary moves to those guests who were unskilled but sufficiently enthusiastic to laugh at his jokes, but Tsukasa was too shy to find a dance partner to learn with, or even to stand somewhere where she might be approached. Instead she wandered off to a bench somewhere to listen to the sounds of other people having fun.<p>

She yawned discreetly. Maybe if onee-chan had come they could be learning the moves together. That would attract a bit of attention, and maybe it would break the ice so Tsukasa wouldn't be so anxious about being next approached by a boy to dance with. And if Konata were still here, she'd be off to the side teasing Kagami regardless of whether Kagami decided to stand in for the boy, or for the girl when she danced with Tsukasa.

Tsukasa couldn't see how Kagami could get so riled up over Konata's teasing. In the end, it had been extremely predictable. Maybe Kagami would start by dancing the boys' part so Tsukasa could learn the moves, then Kagami would be approached by some boy, then trip over her own feet as she tried to do all of her moves in a mirror image of the way she'd been doing them for the past half hour...

Tsukasa sat up suddenly. She could have sworn she saw a familiar flash of blue hair in the distance, under some kind of witch's hat. She ran in that direction, then regretted doing so because there was clearly nobody with a witch's hat in that direction, and besides, she was making herself look silly.

And anyhow, this was certainly not a costume ball! Why would anyone be walking around in a witch costume here?

Tsukasa found her parents, and told them she'd be going home early. She was clearly the odd one out in this place.

* * *

><p>She got home to find her twin sister sleeping in front of the TV.<p>

Tsukasa poured herself a cup of tea and got to thinking about the usual nonsense her head was filled with. Let's see, Kagami's name meant 'mirror' and other people might reflect on her... she yawned.. okay, that didn't make any sense, she decided. Time to think about something else. Why would chlorine wash Kagami's hair out?

Maybe this was a good opportunity to go out to the pharmacy and find out precisely what lavender hair dye was made of. No, she didn't want to make a scene. She pictured herself barging into the pharmacy just before closing time, frightening the clerk with insistent demands to explain what her hair had been dyed with.

Still, if Kagami was a mirror for other people to reflect in, it seemed like she hadn't been polished recently. She still nagged Tsukasa about her study habits on a daily basis even during spring break, but when she did it was in a somewhat uncertain manner. Maybe it was because they were all worrying about exams at the end of the year...

… and there was something else going on right now that Tsukasa couldn't put her finger on and that had her worried. It felt significant, like if she was showing up for class today and had forgotten that they'd even _had _homework...

"Do I really have to say it?" Kagami muttered unexpectedly, blushing in her sleep. "There's _really _no other way to put the house back? All right then."

She shifted in her sleep, straightened up, and mumbled something extremely obscene in a strained voice. Then woke to find Tsukasa staring at her.

It was an awkward moment, to say the least.

* * *

><p>Later that night, with all the family sleeping at home, Hiiragi Tadao wandered downstairs in search of a drink of water.<p>

He was annoyed to once again see the blue-haired apparition in the middle of his living room.

"Damn tanuki doesn't go away." he murmured sadly.

"No fair!" Konata responded. "I should at least rank as a kitsune at this point!"

Hiiragi-san tried to listen in on what the dead girl was saying.

"What? Something about a kitsune with a grudge against you?" he tried to piece together the message.

Konata began to vent clouds of steam out of her ears. It was a surprisingly fun way to relieve frustration.

"... midnight meeting at Shikabe geyser?" Hiiragi-san puzzled out from this. As a Shinto priest he was supposed to have second sight, but running a shrine in suburban Tokyo he didn't exactly get many opportunities to practice it. "Okay, I suppose you were always closest to Kagami in life, so you must be haunting her for some reason. What do you want with my daughter?"

"Like you're going to understand a word I tell you!" Konata said. "In any case, if you can manage to hear me, let's have an agreement: I borrow Kagami's destiny for a while, and in return grant prosperity to your shrine and bountiful family or whatever… wait, what exactly are friendly spirits supposed to grant? I don't remember any manga about it off the top of my head here..."

Tadao shook his head in complete confusion.

"... whatever it wants, I suppose a broom won't cut it." he concluded sadly, going back upstairs. "I'll have to remember how to write the kind of spirit wards that work on other things than tourists..."

"Talking to him didn't work this time either." She frowned. "I was expecting having a priest around to be a bigger obstacle than this..."

She thought back to the room she'd left in the land of the dead. The game of Go was still set up on the table, but neither side was making significant progress against the other. "Who am I playing against, then?"

Her awareness flitted back to her old house, where she discovered that her room had been preserved more or less the way it had been when she was alive.

"Cool!" Konata said, bouncing up onto the bed. "Then again, since my room contains the almost entirely perfectly organized manga bookshelf, it serves a useful storage function even when I'm away. No reason to mess with the room in any case."

She looked into some of the other rooms.

"Yucchan is living here now? I hope she's thought to take advantage of my collection. Oh, that's right... if I see mom I can tell her I found someone to take care of dad for me. Would have been really bad for him to be completely alone in the house..."

Downstairs, Konata found Sojiro looking at a photo of her in a funereal black frame.

"Dad..." she said. This was the part she'd really screwed up, hadn't she?

"Konata?" Sojiro asked suddenly, startling her. "Actually, I was thinking about remarrying!"

"Oh! This is exactly what mom warned me about! Don't worry, dad, she says to just go for it!"

She realized he couldn't actually hear her.

"I realize you would have been completely against it. In your mind, Kanata will always be your only mother... that having a new mom would be too difficult for you.."

"Oh, wow." Konata said, intrigued. "So what kind of person would my new mom have been?"

Sojiro shook his head. "But the sad truth is, I don't really have anyone like that right now.."

He stumbled into an armchair and sighed. Who was he kidding here?

With difficulty, Konata wrenched her mind away from the scene and back into her inner sanctum. Not good. Going into the physical world was affecting her a bit more than she'd expected. She needed to focus on the things she could control even when dead. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to crack open a book on meditation techniques.

* * *

><p>Several days afterwards, the Hiiragi family was watching television. Tadao was still tense about the fact that Konata's ghost kept showing up to hover behind his daughter, something he still hadn't dared to tell the rest of the family about. It was clearly not something Kagami noticed, but it was making her listless and despondent all the same, and spirit wards placed all around the perimeter of the property were not helping. He was severely worried about the long-term effects of this haunting..<p>

"Now, the next question... what is the kenjogo form of the verb 'to go'?" the quiz announcer on the TV asked.

"That must be 'to inquire upon!'" everyone except Kagami decided.

"... the correct answer would be 'to pay a visit!'" the announcer confirmed happily.

Kagami stared at everyone though slitted, annoyed eyes.

"Multiple choice! Which prefecture does not border to ocean?"

Everyone except Kagami guessed Tochigi-ken, correctly.

"And of the hardest known problems in mathematics, which was proven by Princeton's Sir Wiles in 1994?"

There was an expectant pause as everyone waited for the answer to be revealed.

"Wow, everyone's so quiet when a difficult question comes up, huh?" Kagami muttered with annoyance. Her father looked at her with increasing worry.

* * *

><p>Yutaka was happy to receive a phone call from Miyuki inviting her over for the last day of spring break. The Hiiragi twins were also coming, and...<p>

"Oh, one of my neighbours who's entering Ryoo this year is also going to be there! She works very hard, and needs a reminder to relax once in a while, so I usually try to invite her over on occasions like this."

"It's a small world, isn't it?" Yutaka confirmed. "Well, I guess I'll see you there!"

"Yes," Miyuki said, "I am looking forward to having all of you over. Bye, then!"

Miyuki hung up the phone and went over to the house across the street to try to coax Daiichi Minami away from her studies and into a more social situation.

* * *

><p>Before the first day of school, everyone was a bit nervous to see which class they'd been put into.<p>

"Oh, Tsukasa, I got put in the same class with you this year!" Kagami pointed to the board excitedly.

"No... Hiiragi... so close and yet so far apart.." Kusakabe Misao's voice trailed from the board adjacent to them. They were no longer in the same class.

Kagami ignored her and resumed staring at the board. "Of course, that just means dealing with _Kuroi__-__sensei_... she's no picnic.. and I'm never going to be in the same class as Konata now..." she muttered despondently.

"Honestly, though." Misao said. "It's like all these years I've been nothing but a background painting to you.. I think I need a walk outside. I guess four consecutive years in the same class, you get too used to your background painting to notice it and just start chasing additional decorations.." she reflected sullenly.

She departed just as a pile of plastic boxes walked up, huffing a little under the strain. With a start, Kagami and Tsukasa realized that underneath the boxes was Miyuki.

"A nisei relative from Vancouver showed up on our doorstep at 11pm yesterday and..." Miyuki tried to explain. "... well ... It's a very long story but now we have all these cookies we're desperate to get rid of.." she said apologetically.

"Hermit cookies!~~" Misao's voice called cheerfully as she bounded back into view. "Right on schedule!"

She grabbed five boxes from Miyuki without even asking permission.

"Glompf!" she said, ripping open a box and stuffing two cookies into her mouth at odd angles. "Most addictive substance in the universe that's still legal! Hiiragi~~chan, you want one?" she said in a sudden fit of generosity.

"What's the big deal." Kagami wondered, taking a cookie and chewing it thoughtfully. "... it's just a slightly spicy cookie with raisins in it.."

She turned pale suddenly. "It's called a _hermit __cookie_?"

Misao swallowed down the cookies still in her mouth without even bothering to chew them properly. They seemed to cheer her up significantly.

"Yep!" she grinned, displaying one of her prominent fangs. "So about the other night..."

Kagami turned even paler. "That didn't happen! _No __way__!_" She turned around and ran away before anyone could see her starting to cry.

"Uh... Kusakabe-san?" Miyuki asked. "It may be impertinent of me to ask, but... Hiiragi-san seems somewhat upset. What exactly happened 'the other night'..."

"Well first we went bowling! But then a friend of Hiiragi's staged this big battle royale in my honour in exchange for granting infinite hermit cookies! But Kagami-chan refused to participate in it! And now they've gone and put us into different classes..." Misao deigned to reply before dashing off after Kagami. "Gotta run! Hiiragi~~! Stop being such a square! We can still be friends, right?"

Miyuki frowned. This was the sort of thing she'd been told to investigate further by the Animate people. But honestly, she was tired of spying on her friends, and besides that she'd more or less promised to Kagami to stop doing it. Instead, she decided, she would slack off and see who else in Ryoo High was in the mood for hermit cookies.

"Well," she told Tsukasa before wandering off, "let's have a great year together, all right?"

"Yep!" Tsukasa smiled.

"Tell me if you want any cookies.."

"I'll think about it." Tsukasa responded. She still wasn't sure how she felt about Miyuki-san having spied on them for a deranged marketing company... in the end it seemed so out of character for the pink-haired girl that Tsukasa was having to make a conscious effort even to remember it.

Down the hallway, first years were also checking their room assignments.

Yutaka and Minami were standing next to each other. They'd been pleasantly surprised to bump into each other at Miyuki's house, and Yutaka had finally learned the shy girl's name!

"Oh!" Yutaka shouted as she finally located her own name on the board. "Minami-san, we're in the same class! Well, let's have a wonderful year!"

Minami nodded. She looked a bit awkward in a standard Ryoo uniform.

"I'll try to come to class as often as I can manage." she said quietly, smiling a little.

Maybe it was because she normally looked so despondent, Yutaka decided, that when she smiled, it turned out to be the kind of smile you wouldn't trade even for a trillion yen.

* * *

><p>On the first day of school, Kuroi-sensei was once again late to her own class. She burst in, hair ruffled like a scarecrow, and appointed Miyuki as class rep again because there wasn't any time left to decide the issue properly. She wheezed through the other administrative details and announced that they'd all have to work hard this week and stop acting like they were on vacation. She then slumped onto the podium and sighed with exhaustion.<p>

Sitting in the middle of the room, Shiraishi Minoru reflected that this wasn't a very convincing performance on the part of his teacher. If their job was to work hard, he could be doing other things now. Maybe practicing his stage image. Or sitting in the library making an early start on the year's homework. Particularly because on top of the usual show business, there was now trouble with the police to add to the mix. Effectively, he'd been the very last person to talk to voice actress Hirano Aya before her unexplained disappearance a couple of days ago, and was thus being interrogated repeatedly and circuitously about whether she'd exhibited any particularly unusual behaviour that day.

Meanwhile, in a different class, Yutaka was shocked to hear that other people's opinions of Minami weren't exactly favourable.

"I'm Daiichi Minami." the short-haired girl was introducing herself in a deadpan voice at the front of the room. "Prefer to be called by my first name. Nice to meet you."

"She's kind of cute, isn't she?" one boy was whispering to another.

"I was in middle school with her. Girl's a real downer. Barely shows up to class. Never talks. And she just keeps reading piles and piles of these thick medical books about how to cut people open. It's really creepy."

"Really." Yutaka thought with a bit of anger. "So I'm the only one here who notices that Minami is actually a very nice person. It's like I have a special secret all to myself!"

She was next called up to introduce herself. Let's see, she thought, first impressions were important. She stood before the class and tried to decide what she thought of the other children in it... how dare they mock Minami-san without even bothering to figure out what kind of person she was?

"Uh..." she began. "I'm Kobayakawa Yutaka. I may be very small and sickly... and look like a child.. but I didn't skip here from grade school or anything. I'm probably older than some of you here, actually."

A surge of anger again. She felt herself about to do something reckless.

"... if not in years, then up here where it counts!" she shouted, pointing to her head. "If any of you aren't nice to each other, I'll find out and I'll make sure you stop doing it!" she directed this in particular at the two boys who'd been gossiping earler.

"... okay." said the teacher. "I think we have our new class rep right here."

"Gyah!" Yutaka yelped in surprise. She felt like she'd just turned into a weird maniac for a minute.

Getting back to her seat, a little shaken, she found Minami leaning towards her, smiling for the second time that day. "I was required by my mother to apply for class rep if I could." she explained. "Now I'll be able to work in the nurse's office instead."

* * *

><p>Tsukasa yawned. It was getting kind of late and her math homework wasn't finished. Probably onee-chan could offer some help.<p>

She wandered over to Kagami's room and found her older sister sitting over a page of her own homework. She'd done two or three of the problems and was staring at the fourth one, brow furrowed.

Her expression was completely blank.

"Onee-chan?" Tsukasa asked uncertainly.

Kagami ignored her.

Tsukasa went back to her own room and slumped on the bed, trying to figure out how she'd solve her homework.

Tricky polynomial factoring problems... much harder than factoring quadratic equations... quadratic as in square numbers... Misao had shouted that Kagami shouldn't be a square... what did that even mean? This was not going anywhere..

Clearly lateral thinking would be required, Tsukasa decided, grabbing a piece of paper off the desk and staring at it. Konata had mentioned an urban legend about twin-telepathy once, maybe if it actually worked she could see how Kagami used her own head to do math homework and that might give her ideas…

This was getting silly, but there was little hope of accomplishing it any other way, anyhow.

She concentrated, screwing up her face and convulsing her hands and feet. A sudden flood of anger and annoyance filled her, like a radio being tuned past noisy static into a different station.

_... In __any __case__, __why __would __you __dress __me __up __as __Hatsune __Miku__? __Why__? __That__'__s __your __idea __of __romantic__? __And __here __I __thought __you __were __wasting __your __life__, __but __look __what __you__'__ve __been __doing __with __your __afterlife__! ..._

Okay, this was certainly coming out of some weird part of Tsukasa's imagination, not telepathy. There really was something wrong with Kagami, wasn't there? But Hatsune Miku didn't have anything to do with anything... she yawned again... she didn't have any time right now to get to the bottom of her sister's problems, especially not with imaginary twin-telepathy..

Tsukasa next tried to borrow the part of her sister's head that she did math homework with. But she didn't feel any smarter or better organized as a result. She supposed that, in the end, the difference came down to the fact that Kagami didn't give up and Tsukasa did.

She fell asleep with this thought, homework unfinished. She'd have to copy it off someone else in the morning...

Meanwhile Kagami finally managed to slog through her own math homework.

"Hah!" she reassured herself, eyes rimmed with exasperation at herself. "Piece of cake.."

* * *

><p>In the innermost room of her castle, Konata was pacing back and forth impatiently in the torchlight. It had looked cool initially, but it was now just distracting. The only thing that kept Konata from replacing it with fluorescent lighting was stubbornness at not wanting to ruin the special atmosphere she'd created.<p>

"Not good." she said. "Almost no chemistry with Misao. I'm all out of shipping partners. There's potential for twincest... no, I couldn't do that to them. Besides, Tsukasa as the incompetent detective? Not quite the effect I was looking for... Could I maybe try shipping her with the goldfish like in that anime? No, I'd have to mess with the objective rules of reality too much, besides, that's a really stupid idea... the thing has a horrible personality to begin with.. did I force the issue by trying to get her in a relationship too soon?"

She tore at her hair in frustration.

"EURGH, if I didn't get all my knowledge of human relationships from doujins, I'd have more realistic expectations to begin with!"

She looked up and was startled to find Kagami standing there, looking at the Go board.

"Kagami!" Konata shouted. "This is my secret room! How did you get in here?"

She swept the papers with her plans for Kagami's future off the table in case the girl tried to read her own destiny.

"Konata." Kagami said into thin air, her voice breaking. "Next week I won't be able to finish my homework on time. I'm frightened."

Konata stared. Right, she thought uncertainly, this was part of the plan. Kagami would have to suffer like this if her character was to acquire the needed intensity... this was certainly preferable to killing any of her other friends off... she needed to figure out how best to keep going with this..

"You get the last laugh, I guess." Kagami interrupted bitterly in a pale mockery of her usual tsundere comeback.

Konata followed Kagami's gaze to where it met the gameboard. She froze as she noticed a critical oversight in her own formation.

Kagami looked like she was barely holding together. A tear fell out of her eye onto the board with a metallic _plink_.

Konata wasn't sure what to do. She stepped over to Kagami uncertainly and put a hand on her shoulder.

"GAAH!"

A large chunk of Kagami's shoulder broke away. Tsunderes turned out to be made of metallic jigsaw pieces with intricate mechanisms inside.

"Konata..." Kagami smouldered desperately. "... what are you doing to me?"

She started crying, large, jigsaw pieces coming out of her eyes, out of her hair, everywhere, disintegrating, hair turning an ugly swampy green colour... Konata grabbed at her desperately to try to keep Kagami in one piece...

There was nothing but a pile of jigsaw pieces on the floor, scattering in every direction like cockroaches. Konata grabbed at them, and they waved feeble, spindly mechanical legs at her and chittered in protest. The handful she managed to pick up broke apart in her hands with an audible _crunch_.

Exposed to the elements in midair, the white-hot, lavender-coloured _deredere _core of Kagami's personality turned cold and sagged like a taffy.

Konata frowned, summoning Stirling Inferno – the star-tipped magic wand she had only recently invented for herself – and using it to just wrap the entire room up like a canvas bag, with the pieces still inside.

"That's everything." Konata sighed, feeling exhausted. "Now I just have to put her back together in a shape that suits my scenario... oh, what's this?"

A single piece of the puzzle crawled out of the room-bag and dropped into a crevice at her feet.

"DAMMIT!" Konata shouted. "It's going to take me forever to find it in this place!" She stuck Stirling Inferno on top of a nearby slab of concrete to provide light.

She began to dig into the rubble with both hands. She seemed to be in some landfill next to the train tracks, filled with bits and pieces of broken tsundere mechanisms. The sky was an ugly, stormy shade of dark orange, and Kagami's lavender core was blowing about on the wind like an empty plastic bag, she'd have to get it down afterwards and see what kind of alchemies she could perform to make it gentle and white-hot again...

The sharp edges of the mechanisms cut into her hands but she ignored the pain, this was a non-physical dimension, it _couldn__'__t _hurt, there wasn't supposed to be anything that could hurt her if she was already dead...

She finally found the piece. Yes, it was Kagami's, she'd recognize it anywhere. As she grabbed it, it _bit _into her. And closed itself around both her wrists with a clack.

She was now wearing a pair of handcuffs.

"Izumi Konata," a familiar voice said sternly, "you are hereby arrested on two counts of catastrophic interference with reality. At least. We'll let you know if we discover more."

Konata looked up and was startled to see she'd dug quite a large pit. Kyon was above her at the edge of the pit, putting Stirling Inferno into an evidence bag.

"I thought you said I could do anything I wanted!" Konata protested at him. "Why are these handcuffs on me?"

"You _can _do anything here." Kyon said firmly. "In particular, you're the one who put these handcuffs on yourself. I was just reminding you of the fact."

"But I didn't do anything!"

"Obviously, deep down, you must believe you did _something_."

Kagami's disintegration replaying in her mind unpleasantly, Konata tried to slip out of the handcuffs.

_Konata__, __how _dare _you __get __hit __by __that __bus__! __You__'__ve __ruined __everyone __else__'__s __life __by __doing __it__!_

They stayed on. She tried to visualize them being made of thin, stretchable rubber, and pushed against them.

_Konata__-__san__, __I__'__m __sorry__. __I__'__m __the __one __who __gave __the __information __to __write _Preferred Ultimate Fanfiction _with__. __That__'__s __what __set __this __whole __disaster __in __motion__..._

"Miyuki, no!" Konata shouted. "I don't need any self-pity! I'm the one who started this, I'll fix it somehow.."

She made another attempt at the handcuffs.

_Konata__, __make __sure __you __take __care __of __Sojiro __for __me__, __please__? __I __don__'__t __want __him __to __spend __the __rest __of __his __life __sad __and l__onely__..._

Konata screamed.

"Look, are you done sulking?" Kyon asked her. "If you want, I can book an archangel to come back in a hundred years or so and try to sluice what's left of your shattered psyche out of the pit. That seems to be the punishment you've chosen for yourself already."

"WHAT?" Konata shouted. "At least give me a fair trial before leaving me in this dump!"

"Hmm.." Kyon said. "So you're willing to confront your mistakes. That's a good sign. I have to warn you that you'll be up in front of the Queen of this reality. Since it's her reality that you've been messing with, that's only fair, isn't it? I don't care about what you've been doing either way, but she happens to be fairly attached to the laws of physics which you've been ignoring and rewriting this entire past week at your convenience. Are you sure you're prepared to face her? You can just stay in the pit if you want.."

Konata started to climb out of the pit. Like she had any choice.

She remembered that she was supposed to be able to access unlimited potential with her mind. She did have a choice! She had every choice in the world! … She just couldn't think of any at the moment...

Was this how Haruhi had ended up stuck in a high school, unaware of her powers, sulking about her inability to meet anyone interesting? she wondered.

"But I have to put Kagami back together! ..."

"You know, before this whole charade I was taking a liking to you." Kyon said. "You actually looked like you were going to take everything in stride for a while. Most people I have to deal with jump straight to the screaming hopelessly in a landfill part. Still, I could stand in as your defense lawyer at this trial. I don't think you're confident enough to summon any of your friends to defend you, yet.."

"... I'm the only one who can put her back, though!"

"Which is why you need a trial, just to understand what you did to her in the first place. Unless you can do that, you'll never be able to get your friend's life to return to normal. Let's go, all right?"

Kyon grabbed her by the handcuffs and hauled her off the landfill, down the crowded streets, where _everyone_ was staring at her. People were rarely arrested in such dramatic fashion in the afterlife. She saw Yuuko and Mio in the crowd.

"Oh, wow! You were going to eat _my _soul?" Yuuko shouted. "Blue-haired girl, wouldn't you be happier with _your_ soul eaten? Never mind the contest, I can do it for you right here and now. I have a hundred and twenty ringing endorsements right here!" she pointed at the area of her heart.

Mio just waved and mouthed '_good luck with the Queen, you're going to need it_'.

Konata shook her head at the two of them, looking a little sick. The crowd disappeared and the two of them climbed the steps of a courthouse.

As they approached the heavy doors of the courtroom, a sudden thought struck Konata. If Kyon was her defense lawyer and Nagato was to be found working the phones here, then it was not unlikely that the Queen of Reality would turn out to be...

Upon seeing that the figure on the throne was indeed Suzumiya Haruhi, Konata collapsed to the floor in a sudden giggling fit. It was all so funny and so sad, to be judged by _Haruhi _of all the possible fictional characters, when in the stories it was always Haruhi who was threatening to rewrite and destroy objective reality.

A severely annoyed expression crossed Haruhi's face as she read the thought emanations of the girl before her. "Are you _sure _the defendant was experiencing remorse?" she asked Kyon crossly.

* * *

><p>Author's Note: And the season is at its halfway point! The title for the corresponding episode is 'Can't Change So Quickly', which is somehow appropriate. If you're wondering where the tsunderella scene went, it's in the next chapter which covers the same events from Kagami's perspective.<p>

Due to unrelated circumstances, the next chapter will probably also take two weeks to complete. Look forward to it: '_Kagamin__, __witness __for __the __prosecution_'!


	6. Kagamin, witness for the prosecution

**Ten Percent Worth Dying For Season 1: This Universe is Experiencing Technical Difficulties**

**Chapter 5,** Kagamin: witness for the prosecution

Standard Disclaimer: fanfiction consists of derivative works written by fans who wish to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them! Please support the creators of the original works referenced in this fanfic, particularly Lucky Star and (in the case of this chapter) Haruhi Suzumiya.

Upon seeing that the blue-haired girl was still rolling on the floor in a fit of uncontrollable giggling, Haruhi rapped her staff on the side of her throne a couple of times.

It was quite an imposing room. The whim of the decorator had avoided the usual mahogany paneling used for the offices of great deities in favour of great concrete blocks hanging over the proceedings, inset with planks of rough, unpolished wood of varying assortment, scarred in a pattern of strange gashes filled in with odd colours that mouldered vaguely; something intermediate between the seventies' perception of a futuristic architecture and an artistically-minded child's doodle trying to escape the paper.

From her throne in the middle of it, Haruhi glared at Kyon meaningfully.

"What?" Kyon asked.

Haruhi rapped her staff again.

"Gugh.." Kyon groaned, then cleared his throat and spoke in a thunderous voice. "**The defendant will obey rules of decorum in front of Suzumiya Haruhi, Queen of All Reality.**"

Upon hearing this, Konata was only driven to further giggling.

"Haruhi," Kyon observed, "you realize that about twenty different gods are probably angry at you by now for using that title? It's not even technically correct, since you're only Queen of one reality and there are an uncountable number of other…"

Haruhi silenced him with a gesture, then continued to regard Konata moodily. Eventually a gleeful look came into her face: "Well, if she doesn't want to be polite, I get to…"

With a flick of her finger, she threw Konata against one wall of the room, then deposited her into the defendant's podium. Konata found herself unable to move from it, and was left to stare at the proceedings curiously.

"… all right then! Since the defendant is unwilling to observe basic courtesy, let's just barrel on and get this over with! We have present, chief justice, _Suzumiya Haruhi_; defendant, _Izumi Konata_; prosecutor and court secretary (on loan from the Integrated Data Authority), _Nagato Yuki_; bailiff and defense lawyer, _, ahem, that is _Kyon_."

"My precious old name!" Kyon wailed quite openly. "And what kind of tabletop courtroom scenario is this? _Four people_? The _defense lawyer_ is the _bailiff_?"

He regarded the vast chamber about him.

"What about a _jury_?"

"This is a hybrid Napoleonic/Inquisitorial court system!" Haruhi announced unhelpfully, waving her staff wildly into the air. "Without further ado, then!"

…

"Yuki, that was your signal to start!"

"Yes." Yuki stepped up. She was dressed in something that wasn't quite a business suit and wasn't quite a tuxedo.

The only thing Konata could think right now was _wow, that would make good cosplay_. Other than that she was feeling a bit numb inside. Though she was developing a suspicion that Kagamin's recent disintegration was only a visible anxiety or phantasm, not something that actually happened, it was still extremely disconcerting.

"… charges listed against the defendant are as follows. Tampering with the objective laws of reality, in ways included, but not limited to, initiating an extended haunting without requisite permission; tampering via the direct rewriting of objective laws without the consent of an appropriate local deity; tampering via the introduction of a low vibrational entity onto the physical plane; tampering retroactively via traveling, sending a proxy to travel, or enabling the travel of an unwitting accomplice in a manner inconsistent with the forward flow of time…"

"Excuse me…" Kyon asked. "Which of these charges actually apply in this case?"

"Uncertain." Yuki responded. "… using aforementioned tampering to perform modifications to the local reality outside of mortal purview, thus removing the local reality from the parameter range deemed acceptable by the local deity…"

"_Please don't tell me she managed to do_ all that _within the space of a couple of weeks._" Kyon mumbled looking sideways at Konata.

"Uu..uuh.." Konata said, now having even more serious things to worry about than Kagami. "I didn't really do any of that! … did I?"

"I woke up this morning and everything had been switched around!" Haruhi sounded more excited than angry about this. "There must be a culprit!"

"Izumi Konata is the only person outside from the local deity who performed substantial alterations to the reality in question from outside." Nagato explained. "Safeguards within the reality itself prevent alterations to objective laws outside of a statistically acceptable level of coincidence, temporary and local adjustments to macroscopic parameters mostly limited to warmth, splatter, or lemon, or other adjustments that do not cause macroscopically observable effects across the whole reality. Aside from the possibility of divine intervention, which is outside the scope of these proceedings, Izumi Konata is logically the only possible suspect."

"Wha.. what?" Konata squeaked, just barely catching the last part. "I'm sitting here in front of a goddess and you're ignoring the possibility of divine intervention?"

"If it was divine intervention, _from my perspective_, then by definition there would be nothing I could do about it!" Haruhi explained. "But since I have to do something about this unseemly breach of reality, I'm forced to assume that the only plausible suspect did it!"

"I don't understand." Konata said. "I thought this was going to be about breaking Kagamin!"

"My client is clearly confused by this." Kyon took over. "If she can't understand clearly what the charges against her are, how can she plead innocent or guilty without perjuring herself?"

"Keeping the subject confused and on her toes," Haruhi waved, "is a certain way to cause her to commit a mistake that might lead into a confession!"

"What confession?" Kyon asked. "Even if my client wished to throw the case away on a frivolous confession, she'd have no idea what to say at this point!"

"By the way, Kyon. What exactly is the deal with this whole thing?" Haruhi gestured vaguely at herself.

"What?"

"You know…" she seemed to have trouble finding words. "Age… uniform….. personality… this particular gathering of supernatural beings…"

"Excuse me, if you're going to start having a surreal moment, please leave me out of it."

"Kyon!" Haruhi snapped. "What is the deal with it? The SOS Brigade? What the hell?"

"…" Kyon looked taken aback. "Didn't you start the whole thing?"

"Yes, I remember that part, but how did it **happen**?"

"A helpful item of folklore," Nagato declared, "may be the unusual belief that God appears to the dead in the form that they believe God most likely to take on."

Haruhi looked at Konata with undisguised contempt.

"Really, who would think that kind of thing up? An omnipotent schoolgirl?"

This wasn't fair, Konata decided. Here she'd met one of her favourite fictional characters, and she seemed to be mocking Konata for liking that particular fiction in the first place.

"Hmm…" Kyon mused. "… perhaps this might be termed a case of fatally appropriate irony."

"More to the point of this trial, who would proceed to take the idea seriously?"

"I'm startled to think that my client's tastes in literature have any bearing on the case." Kyon interjected.

"People shouldn't be permitted to warp reality when they've barely got the brains to graduate high school!" Haruhi indicated Konata rather than herself on that later point. "That kind of nonsense…" she gestured generally at the situation of the courtroom "… leads to this kind of thing!"

"… talk about rubbing it in …" Konata interjected quietly.

"But really, my existence and my long history as a reality-warping schoolgirl must be certain evidence…"

"Excuse me…" Kyon interrupted.

"… that there must be an even more demented being than myself who thought this entire scenario up, and then threw this Izumi girl my way to mock me!" Haruhi concluded triumphantly.

"Wow." Kyon said. "That is a truly profound thought. Now that the situation has finished deconstructing itself, can we get back to the trial?"

"Oh, but you see…" Haruhi announced. "… this is all exceedingly relevant to the case. Kyon, you just don't understand the difficulties of a purely metaphorical plane. _Anything_ could be used to cause _anything else_, no matter how much it fails to make sense. The fact that I, Haruhi Suzumiya, am presently Haruhi Suzumiya, whereas the defendant just _happens_ to have been inspired by a manga and anime series with a character closely resembling myself…"

She pointed at Konata accusingly.

"… is nothing less than circumstantial evidence in the case!"

"Out of order!" Kyon shouted in exasperation. "You haven't been called as a witness yet! I thought presenting evidence of wrongdoing was the prosecutor's job!"

"**I'm the chief justice here, I decide what's out of order!**" Haruhi responded. "Ahem. Sorry, Yuki, we were interrupting you."

"Charges having been announced," Nagato blinked, "I would like to call the first witness."

"Wait! Aren't you going to ask how the defendant pleads?"

"Doesn't matter! Guilty!" Haruhi yelled imperiously. "Call the witness!"

"_That doesn't make any sense._" Kyon grumbled as a pillar of blue-gray smoke materialized in the middle of the chamber.

"Hiiragi Kagami." Nagato announced as the indicated person appeared within the pillar.

"Kagami!" Konata shouted with relief. "You're still in one piece!"

"Barely." Kagami offered, looking around in confusion. "What's going on? Where is this?"

"Name?" Nagato asked.

"… Hiiragi Kagami. Look, can you explain what this place is?"

"Occupation?"

"Who are you?"

"Help me, Kagamin!" Konata shouted. "Don't give anything away! I've been arrested by fictional characters for the crime of messing with your head!"

"Don't coach the witness!" Haruhi shouted.

Kagami seemed to vaguely recognize Haruhi at this point. "That sounds like a pain… waitaminute, you've just spent the entire past week messing with my head!"

"Occupation?"

Kagami stared blankly at Nagato.

"If I might make a suggestion," Kyon said, "maybe this would go more smoothly if we questioned the girl's higher self."

Kagami suddenly seemed to lose consciousness as the pillar of smoke she was still enveloped in resolved itself into the lower half of a blue-gray variant of the standard miko outfit. It belonged to an indistinct figure which was now cradling the smaller Kagami protectively.

"Name?" Nagato questioned.

"Hiiragi Kagami." the being announced in a calm and collected voice. "But you may call me Kagami-sama."

It stared balefully at Kyon for some reason.

"Quit staring at me!" Kyon answered, looking uncomfortable.

"Intense…" muttered Konata. "I wonder if she's still a tsundere?"

"Occupation?"

"Of the higher self or lower self?" Kagami-sama responded.

"Both / and."

"Higher self: chaperone and general moderating influence. Lower self: schoolgirl, currently on downwards academic trajectory due to psychological exhaustion after being repeatedly haunted by my dead friend." Kagami-sama rattled off.

"What is your relationship to the defendant?"

"Tsukkomi."

"…" Nagato seemed unsure as to the proper reaction to this.

"No, but seriously?" Kyon decided to help her out.

"In our present incarnation, she routinely pestered me with information about anime, and I would snap at her in irritation."

"No.." Konata said. "Was that really it, Kagami-sama?"

"Well," Kagami-sama relented, "if you take the cosmic perspective on things. It's sort of my job as higher self to do that. If you're that bothered by my responses, you _should_ know that my incarnation has a bizarre and unhealthy attachment to this process, and would probably respond differently."

Konata's mixed feelings to Kagami-sama's response escaped her as a slightly-hurt "gyuh.." sound.

"List all instances of supernatural visitation by defendant." Nagato instructed, ignoring the exchange.

Kagami-sama sighed and began rattling off a list of dates and times for telephone conversations.

"We're not getting anywhere at this rate!" Haruhi cut her off. "Okay, first instance of nontrivial reality warping by defendant. Where were you then?"

"Why is the judge questioning the witness? _This is the most disordered courtroom I've ever been in!_" Kyon complained to the pretentiously designed ceiling.

"Kyon!" Haruhi said. "Have you ever actually been in a courtroom before?"

"Sure I have. You remember the Shinigami Ryuk incident?"

"What?"

"The Shinigami Ryuk incident… oh right, you had amnesia for about half of that. Does the term 'Delusion Note' ring any bells? I still can't believe you had the nerve to try something so idiotic and dangerous."

"Can we stay on topic here?" Haruhi asked, reddening slightly. "First instance of reality warping, Nagato, ask her about it!"

"Understood. At what point did you first witness the defendant perform a nontrivial instance of reality warping, and where were you at the time?"

"Let's see… that must have been the night of the spring dance, when I was asleep and my family was out of the house. Although my incarnation was unable to distinguish between cases when the visitation was performed via phone call or via shared dream, I can tell you that this was in fact the first shared dream."

"Relate all aspects of the incident you would consider relevant."

"Look, is it really such a big deal?" Kagami-sama interrupted. "So in one of my incarnations my friend dies and then messes with my head and grants a classmate probability-defying powers, which I assume is what you're upset about. I have hundreds of other incarnations planned where some other silly thing will probably go wrong and render the whole thing useless. This doesn't really change my long term prospects in any way, so how can I be concerned about it."

"Any unusual events concerning Izumi Konata are of particular concern to this court."

"Fine then. I'll explain what happened."

* * *

><p>With the family gone to the spring dance, Kagami was alone in the house, killing the remaining time of her spring vacation with a combined dosage of television and newspaper.<p>

"Allow me to grant your innermost wish!" Konata announced, opening the door to the room.

"You!" Kagami started up from the floor. "Where did you spring from?"

She did a double-take at the costume the ghost happened to be dressed in, a strange combination of a blue-and-white high school uniform, and a witch's robe and hat. It seemed oddly familiar.

"… and what is with the suspicious costume?"

"Calm down, calm down! Just as a note, in this scenario I'm playing a magician."

"What scenario? Aren't you supposed to be dead? What happened?"

"Now, now, Kagamin. Don't sweat the details."

"What do you mean, details? I spent a _week_ having to come around in the evenings to stare at your remains to prevent your dad from a nervous breakdown!"

"Oh." Konata said. "Sorry about that part. But it'll all turn out okay, trust me!"

"Somehow I don't feel particularly inclined to!"

"Really? After all the time we've spent together?"

"_Especially_ after all the time I spent putting up with you! … I mean.." Kagami broke down. "I guess Dad was right when he said that spending so much time with a dead body would be unhealthy. It must do funny things to your brain.. I mean even when you're visiting me from the other side I just keep shouting at you…"

She sat back down again and looked at her knees in shame.

"I never wanted to be friends in that stupid way."

Konata knew how to respond to this. She sat down next to Kagami and put an arm around her shoulder. She was severely tempted to extend this gesture to a comforting hug.

But considering her plans for Kagami's evening, decided that it might introduce complications. Instead she settled for teasing the girl gently.

"Aww, Kagamin was lonely…"

"Yes!" Kagami shouted, removing Konata's hand from her shoulder. "Of course I was lonely, Sherlock! Having someone close to you die does that!"

Konata assumed a hurt expression.

"… I'm sorry for snapping at you like that again!" Kagami said quickly. "I guess I should figure out what I need to do to turn the page and move on. These dreams I keep having about being visited by you are getting old."

"Oh, but these are no ordinary dreams! In the macrospatial quantum galactic whirlpool of arcane energies, the thought patterns of my dying thoughts have been imprinted, and myriad vibrational frequencies weave together to enable me to provide your life with guidance towards a brighter future!"

"Last time you claimed to be imprinted in the dying embers of the magnetic biosphere… are you going to help me with my grief or not? Or just continue to provide irrelevant boke?"

"Oh, but you see, this whole thing of 'moving on' is a false premise! I have no intention of disappearing from your life anytime soon."

…

"You're going to keep haunting me now?" Kagami paraphrased.

"Exactly!"

"Well, go ahead." the lavender-haired girl threw her hands up. "I guess it'll just be a continuation of how you've been haunting my life all through high school…"

"… except with magical wish granting!" Konata corrected her.

"Thank you, but no. I'm sure any wish you could grant would be more trouble than it is worth."

"Oh, I see, you're just sulking because you've been abandoned by your family while they left to have fun.."

"Where is this going?"

"What's that? You wish to attend the spring dance?"

"What? No! Gods, you're the very definition of _belligerent ghost_."

Konata sighed and began to explain.

…

"So let me get this straight. In this.. scenario of yours I'm supposed to be Cinderella, and you're a good magician. And I have to get on a carriage in order to attend the ball?"

"Exactly!" Konata confirmed, then took out a magic wand with a cardboard star on the end and proceeded to use it to desecrate the Hiiragi family shrine into a crude semblance of a horseless carriage with seatbelts.

"**WHAUGH**" Kagami responded to this new development.

"Don't worry, don't worry." Konata reassured her. "It's not like any of your ancestors will sue us for this."

"Now I'm afraid of exactly that happening."

"How would you know?"

"Well, I'd be inclined to trust your knowledge on the afterlife more than my own. … This is kind of surreal right here if this is just a dream. But yeah, assuming the premises to the dream, you're the one who's supposed to be dead."

"Then why don't you respect my judgment, Kagamin, and calm down?"

"No, you have me wrong." Kagami said. "I said I trust your knowledge. Not your judgment. Gods, definitely not that."

"Well, hop on in any case!"

Their brief altercation was resolved by Kagami shouting that she never wanted to go to any spring dance and that Konata should just stop haunting her if she didn't have anything productive to contribute, and Konata sighing and leaving the room.

"Nuts!" Kagami shouted upon noticing that the family shrine still had seatbelts. "I have to get her to change the shrine back!"

The house lurched, shifted, and started shaking. An earthquake?

No, Konata had just taken the house and was now sliding it down the street at an alarming rate.

"Oh, Kagami! It's not safe to go out right now, you might get run over."

"Not safe?" Kagami yelled, murder in her eyes. "You're the one violating about ten building codes right now!"

She wasn't making sense, but you try to do it when your house suddenly starts running away down the street, with you still in it.

"Let's see…" Konata pondered, nibbling the cardboard star at the end of her magic wand thoughtfully, which to Kagami looked like a dangerous thing to do. "… but that's the position I'm stuck in.. if Kagami doesn't leave the house, the house can…"

"Okay, I get it! Let's just take the shrine!"

Getting on the shrine, an additional question ocurred to Kagami.

"By the way, Konata, you know I haven't mentioned these hauntings to my family yet. I'm not sure my dad would react very well if he found out we were spending time together like this…"

"Oh, that isn't going to happen!" Konata said calmly.

"… I'm kind of starting to agree with him, seeing you all the time is very distracting.. wait, what?"

"Why does it never occur to Kagamin to specifically bring up my hauntings at the dinner table?" Konata asked rhetorically.

"… I guess I should have brought it up earlier, now that I think about it…"

"Why does an actor never start to discuss with the spectators what they should have for dinner?" Konata questioned unhelpfully.

"Look, I'm really worried about how to handle this situation…"

"… because they'd be breaking the Fifth Wall!" Konata concluded triumphantly!

"What? … and shouldn't it be the Fourth Wall?" Kagami asked.

"What? No!" Konata echoed. "Look:"

She pointed to four imaginary walls.

"One, two, three, four walls, and then the Fifth Wall is the one you can break just by saying the wrong thing!"

"… you're right." Kagami admitted. "I'm not sure what drove me to ask that. Huh. So you have this fifth wall thing going on."

Which is why they were now riding a shrine through the local shopping street, while around them people were going about their business normally.

* * *

><p>"I would like to interrupt the telling at this point." Nagato said. "Izumi Konata specifically mentioned to you this notion of a 'fifth wall'. Did she explain at any other point what it was?"<p>

"No." Kagami-sama said. "Although obviously it was a contaiment structure designed to prevent any information about her haunting escaping, presumably until _after_ she got me into whatever state she wanted me to end up in."

"A data contamination barrier." Nagato paraphrased. "Which indicates that data manipulation occurred which it was necessary to contain due to an inherent level of danger."

"No, more like Konata didn't want me to come running to my family with stories of being visited by her ghost." Kagami-sama counted. "I'm not sure if she was being paranoid or just considerate about it, actually."

"Look, why are we wasting our time with this line of questioning?" Haruhi asked. "All we see is that the defendant embarked on a series of visitations with the witness, which certainly were stupid and laughable but I don't see the level of catastrophic damage to my reality that the court has been assembled to examine!"

"Look!" Konata finally gathered the courage to butt in. "Haruhi! Get a grip!"

Konata was hoping that imitating Kyon's style of adress would somehow let her get a handle on the proceedings. Thus far the moment Konata paid attention to one thing, the court's thread of reasoning ran away to something completely unrelated, and it was getting to her.

Instead, Haruhi simply bristled at being addressed in this manner.

"I don't understand what I'm being accused of!" Konata continued. "There wasn't any significant damage to anything except Kagami's ability to do homework! That's all you used to drag me into this court!"

"_That's for the court to decide._" Haruhi whispered dangerously. "How can we know that no damage occurred, based merely on the say-so of a _suspected criminal_, who has very recently been in _close contact_ with a reality in the process of being damaged to boot, with who knows what repercussions? And Nagato, can you stop fooling around with the shared dreams and unearth some actual evidence from some other witness?"

Konata was lost again. It was a bit like one of those dreams, where you feel like you've done something wrong, but for the life of you can't figure out what it is, and people are ignoring you or being generally unhelpful or confusing.

In fact, maybe it _was_ one of those dreams. She was beginning to doubt whether she was actually dead, or just insane. Or maybe both. Was there any definitive way to be sure of either? The researchers back on Earth were getting carried away studying her head, probably, because there was still the annoying sucking feeling in her skull, like half of her head was empty, or missing, or gone, but as she felt at it surreptitiously it seemed like her head was an entirely ordinary blue-haired head. Half of the head dominant, the other ascendant, expanding and fuzzing out portions of her planning with informations about pharmaceutical quantities… did heads normally do that, even if they did have blue hair? Konata was getting confused.

What was she trying to accomplish here?

"Negative." Nagato was responding to Haruhi's request, as Konata spaced out and started to look a bit sickly. "The interaction of the defendant with the physical reality in question was limited almost entirely to this series of shared dreams and visitations. Testimony may contain relevant causal details which we are overlooking."

* * *

><p>Tsukasa yawned. It was getting kind of late and she was having trouble doing her homework again. Probably onee-chan could offer some help, though she was starting to worry that her sister was having problems of her own.<p>

She wandered over to Kagami's room and was surprised to find her slumped over the table, fast asleep. Maybe she'd finished her homework already?

Ever so gently, Tsukasa tugged the notebook out from underneath Kagami's arm.

The person writing it had started out solving about half of the problems, got stuck on one, and from there on the paper consisted of absent-minded doodles and complaints how they couldn't think of anything to do. Then gradually falling asleep, the writing becoming less legible and coherent.

"No good. Court date in hell right now." the almost illegible scrawl at the bottom of the paper read.

Well, Kagami certainly _hadn't_ finished. Tsukasa promptly stopped worrying about her own homework and stared worrying about Kagami's. She paced back and forth through the room, trying to figure out why her sister had changed like this. Falling asleep over homework hadn't _ever_ happened to her before.

Somehow it didn't occur to Tsukasa to wake her sister up.

Not thinking of anything useful she instead went back to her own room and slumped on the bed hopelessly.

Maybe she could give twin-telepathy a second try?

She stretched out on the bed and strained her feet and strained her hands but no useful information came her way.

* * *

><p>"Wow, is this what they call a 'court date in hell'?" the Tsukasa that appeared suddenly in the courtroom said wonderingly.<p>

"How did you get in here?" Haruhi asked dubiously. "This is a restricted area."

"Oh, there's Kagami! There's Kona-chan… wasn't she supposed to be dead? Is this what hell looks like? Why is she in handcuffs?"

"Excuse me." Haruhi said. "Pay attention to when the chief justice is speaking!"

Ignoring her, Tsukasa looked at Kagami-sama and tilted her head to one side curiously.

"Don't ignore me!" Haruhi seethed.

"Wow, I've never seen that side of onee-chan before.."

"I'm Kagami's higher self, who guides her actions from a detached and cosmic perspective." Kagami-sama explained patiently.

"Oh, that makes sense… I'm kind of surprised this worked actually."

"It didn't." Haruhi announced gleefully.

"What?"

"All of the living witnesses in this courtroom are just magnetic projections of the originals. Copies, if you will." Haruhi explained with obvious relish at having obtained Tsukasa's attention. "See, unless you're very skilled or very lucky, the energies comprising your projection will get ripped into their component parts on approaching physical reality, and the only thing that makes it back to the body is a vague imprint on the subconscious."

"Huh?" Tsukasa stared.

"In other words, you won't remember any of this when you wake up, so it almost doesn't matter what you do."

"Oh.. but you have all these higher selves sitting around and stuff… I can still do some damage, then!" Tsukasa announced confidently, seeming to concentrate and look inside herself for a minute.

The smaller Tsukasa vanished, replaced by a figure of the same height as Kagami-sama, dressed in a lab coat and bowtie, and carrying a restaurant reviewer's notebook and pen.

Haruhi's face turned pale with recognition. "Hii.. Hiiragi-sama!" she said, forcing her face into a frightened grimace of hospitality that really did not suit her. "I didn't expect to see you here!"

"You know," Tsukasa's new form pointed out, "you're the one who pushed me into trying out this universe. I'd supposed that you'd go all out not to allow people to make a mess like this. Particularly since I let you give me preferred placement in Japan!"

"I.. uh.. well.." Haruhi tried to come up with a response.

"Well, I sympathize." Tsukasa said kindly. "Kona-chan can be a handful even without reality-warping powers! Anyhow, if I published a bad review people would stop deciding to incarnate here. Then you'd have to stage a nuclear war or something to mask the decline in arriving souls. That'd be a pity… to tell the truth I've grown kind of attached to this place."

Haruhi glanced at Kyon fearfully. Kyon shrugged, as if to say 'you had this coming.'

"Anyhow!" Tsukasa said, winking at Haruhi. "So you figure out how to fix this mess and I won't tell anyone about it. Whereas if you mess it up further, I see no reason for myself not to become like Konata and just give myself everything I want. You don't want to see me when I'm running amok, do you? So that takes care of that."

She then resumed completely ignoring the Queen of Reality.

"Kona-chan, cheer up!" Tsukasa then announced to the still sickly-looking Konata. "Believe in yourself! Uh.. I mean… you know, stuff like that! Look, if on the inside I'm actually this self-assured and wonderful person you see here… I mean, not to be immodest or anything.. just think of what you could be if you wanted!"

Konata seemed to perk up at this slightly, so Tsukasa went around to her next target of chastisement.

"Kagami-sama, I'm disappointed with you, to be honest. It's your job to stop onee-chan from breaking down like that! Did you know she's fallen asleep in front of her homework for probably the very first time in her life just now?"

With a bit of curiosity, Konata decided to try to get a glimpse of what her own 'higher self' looked like. What she found was a being of roaring shadow, like a dragon but infinitely more alarming.

"Hi there." the being said to her in a huge, gravelly voice. "You sure you want to let me out in front of the court? It probably won't score any points with Haruhi."

"Okay…" Konata trembled. The less said or thought about this, the better.

Unheeding of this, Kagami-sama and Tsukasa were still arguing.

"… You think my job in life is to get good marks and become a lawyer?" Kagami-sama was protesting. "Like I told them, chaperone and general moderating influence. At this point things are too far gone for me to moderate, so it doesn't matter what happens to me either way."

"But if things go back to normal and you're buried in your own problems, won't you regret behaving like this? And I thought you were the higher self here! Your incarnation is far more responsible than you. Get your act together!"

"… I guess I should be acting differently…" Kagami-sama said, not at all enthusiastically.

"And I guess that takes care of things!" Tsukasa announced happily. "Well, I won't take up any more of your valuable time.."

"You still won't remember any of this when you wake up, you know." Kagami-sama pointed out.

"Oh, doesn't matter." Tsukasa said. "I have excellent sprit guides, I'll just pass a note to them on my way out to do their stuff."

Haruhi frowned on hearing this.

"Well, I'll be seeing you around!" Tsukasa waved before vanishing.

* * *

><p>Tsukasa decided that she should stop attempting to engage in twin-telepathy. The only thing that had resulted this time was a brief and disconnected fantasy of herself in a lab coat and bowtie, of all things. (Although she was sort of curious now what people would think of her in that outfit!) Probably all she was accomplishing was taking her mind off the hook in order to free-associate strange things like that. Instead of gaining any insight into why Kagami was unable to finish her homework all of a sudden.<p>

She went downstairs and poured herself a cup of tea to relax. Her older sister Inori nodded from across the table, nose buried in a novel.

Oh, this was all so worrying!

Kagami's reputation at school was at stake here.

She probably still had many chances to pull herself together.

But what was Tsukasa going to do about her own homework? Either she'd have to start getting help from someone else in the meantime, or her grades would go down… or…

Either way, it would reveal to the rest of the school that Tsukasa wasn't getting help from Kagami anymore… and then everyone would know Kagami was having trouble of her own… onee-chan would be really discouraged by that.

Which meant that she was now responsible for doing all of her homework properly, for the sake of her family's reputation at Ryoo. Oh, she hadn't planned for this!

What had Konata said about her once?

_You know you have something to worry about when you end up having to learn a fact from_ Tsukasa_._

Ooh, if that was true, then it was definitely worrying for the Hiiragis' reputation at Ryoo to be hinging on her now! She wished she'd realized this sooner!

"What's the matter?" Inori asked. "You look like there's something on your mind."

Tsukasa started, nearly spilled her tea, then tried to explain the situation she was in, as vaguely as she could manage.

* * *

><p>"That… was the last person I wanted to be involved in this…" Haruhi said, shaking a little, once 'Hiiragi-sama' was gone. "Anyhow, Nagato, can you continue with the questioning?"<p>

"Please complete the telling of your shared dream with the defendant." Yuki relayed to the giant miko-robed figure, which shrugged and resumed the flashback.

* * *

><p>As the shrine ground on through the streets, Kagami fingered her now blue-green locks nervously. Konata had shamelessly faked Kagami into an outfit patterned after well-known computer-generated songstress Hatsune Miku (and then lied that her magic wand was broken and unable to change her back) and transformed her hair correspondingly. The highly stylized gray school uniform, while reasonably cut for a computer-generated 3D image that didn't have to adhere to the laws of physics, felt just strange and awkward on Kagami. In fact, several laws of physics had probably already been broken, or else Kagami would already have had a fatally embarassing wardrobe malfunction. And with that hair colour, the tsundere felt like she'd just had her weekly chlorinated hairstyle emergency, that she'd just been complaining about to Tsukasa earlier that day.<p>

And she was holding a leek, that she couldn't seem to get rid of. What was with that?

Arriving at the dance, Kagami's jaw dropped and she was forced to forget the costume in sheer disbelief at what she was seeing.

The tacky banner at the top read "Love's Power is Infinite!", mingled with splashes of paint meant to suggest, of all things, bloodstains. The auditorium wasn't set up for dancing, it was set up for a mixed martial arts tournament.

This wasn't merely the product of a disturbed imagination. Rather, several disturbed imaginations must have worked together in a highly coordinated fashion to set this up.

For instance: "Isn't that Kuroi-sensei up in the ring?" Kagami asked, looking at the fight going on in the middle.

"This is a decisive component of the wish granting!" Konata explained, swelling with pride. "You should be happy, Kagami, few ghosts have the skills or the audacity to set something like this up! Not only did I have to time-displace several people's dreams so that they could participate in this without noticing, I suggested the scenario to their subconscious minds so that it would play out without needing any supervision!"

Indeed, Kagami recognized many of the people from her school in the audience, or contestant lineup, or… was her classmate Minegishi Ayano refereeing this match? Maybe it fit with her semi-secret enjoyment of MMA, but Ayano-san was also someone who would quite reasonably stay out of whatever strange scheme Konata was cooking up here.

"I'll let you in on a little secret…" Konata whispered. "This dream you're having… isn't really a dream! See, the people here might all be in a dream state that makes this scenario seem plausible to them, but they're all in a fully consistent overlay reality! If things go according to plan, I can just collapse this dimension onto the one you came from, then your innermost wish will be granted in waking life!"

"Right." Kagami said, unconvinced.

"… in other words, we're in a closed space of my creation!" Konata said, trying to elicit a more interested reaction.

"Do you mean…" Kagami tried to remember, then looked around as though expecting blue giants to smash the roof of the school open. "_Isn't that kind of dangerous?_"

"Not when handled properly and with full awareness of the consequences!"

"Look, I don't really care about any of this, so how can it grant my innermost wish?" Kagami asked, not really believing the overlay dimension stuff. Though, come to think of it, it did feel suspiciously like she was still awake. If only the scene before her eyes weren't so impossible..

"And I had _better_ not end up having to kiss you or anything to end this like in the book…" it occurred to Kagami to give a warning.

"How about this!" Kuroi shouted in the ring, catching her opponent in a painful-looking submission hold.

The opponent surrendered, and Ayano announced Kuroi-sensei's victory. Kuroi then snatched the microphone from her: "Today's the day! You just wait, Prince Misao!"

Kagami noted how badly Kuroi-sensei's provocative red and black fighting costume clashed with the blue ribbon tying her ponytail.

Kuroi was addressing herself to a student clad in a small, bulbous jeweled crown, and a dashingly cut but hopelessly old-fashioned man's suit, the kind you'd expect a character in one of Shakespeare's historical plays to don, if only it wasn't bright orange.

"Alright! Win and win and win and win and win and etc.!" the figure shouted. "The strongest girl in this place… shall become my bride!"

"They're getting heated up, aren't they?" Konata commented.

"So if I'm getting this scenario straight," Kagami said as she stared unbelievingly at the figure on the throne, "out of the entire Tokyo region, tens of millions of people, you went to find the prince of my dreams and ended up picking, of all people, Kusakabe Misao?"

"Ooh, Hiiragi~chan~~!" Misao's voice trailed, approaching in their direction. "I knew you'd come for me!~"

"… she's not even a guy!" Kagami protested before being glomped forcefully by the aforementioned hyperactive menace. "Get off of me!"

"So did you dress up like that just for me?"

"No."

"Are you going to fight for my sake?"

Kagami considered the prospect of having to go into a ring and pummel her homeroom teacher into submission. (What would Kuroi-sensei make of a dream like that, anyways?)

"… why are you in on this nonsense?" she decided to ask instead.

"Why not? Join in! I can even help you pass the matches!"

Kagami lost her temper.

"Don't arrange some martial arts contest if you're just going to rig it! I don't want to join a contest like that, or be your bride!"

"What's this, Hiiragi~~? So cold.."

"Prince, remember what I explained to you about tsunderes at the briefing.." Konata sidled up and whispered in Misao's ear.

"Oh so does that mean…!"

"NO IT DOESN'T!" Kagami shouted at the two of them. "This is exactly why I didn't want to come here. Look, are you really lucid, or do you just think this is a dream?"

"Oh, but it is a dream! And I'm fully lucid!" Misao confirmed happily. "I've never had actual-Kagami and dead-Konata join me in a dream before though! I've met dream-Kagami plenty of times though! That was always cool."

Kagami decided she didn't want to know.

"Look, if you knew that this is all contrived by Konata, why did you agree to it? This whole situation is kind of ridiculous… I thought I was going to the spring dance."

"Oh, but it doesn't matter that it's ridiculous! I get to hang out with actual-Kagami and we do anything we want together. We never get to do what we want together in real life! Ok, so you don't want to fight or do bowling just tell me what you do want! I'll always be there to do it with you, promise! We've been together since middle school! I always wanted you to look at me properly! Just once!"

"…"

Kagami stood slightly stunned by this confession.

"… plus I get a bonus wish into the bargain even if the true love stuff doesn't work out, so I'm set!" Misao announced, completely killing the mood.

"Wishing again?" Kagami asked, frowning.

"Oh, but you see!" Konata persisted. "That is why I am a good magician who grants everyone their innermost wishes!"

Misao nodded happily.

"I'm almost frightened to find out what Misao's innermost wish was."

"Infinite hermit cookies!" Misao said, producing a sample of precisely that form of confectionery.

Kagami stared at it. "Come again?"

"Hermit cookies! As many as I care to eat!"

"… so a dead person comes to you and promises to grant a wish. And you wish for _cookies_. Don't you have a dead father or something?" Kagami wondered. "Wouldn't that be a better use of your wish to go check on him?"

"Nu-uh!" Misao said. "He'd just scold me for wasting a wish foolishly! It's not like I won't just meet him right after I die! Besides, I read stuff with genies in it and stuff. A simple wish like for cookies is less likely to backfire! It's fool-proof, it's even Misao-proof!"

Kagami decided not to comment any further on this. Instead she cleared her throat.

"Anyhow, I need to go home."

"You're already going?" Misao asked in genuine surprise.

"I have to go back before 12pm in order to change back, don't I? If I don't hurry up, the carriage will disappear and then I'm stuck taking the bus like this, aren't I?"

_Nuts, I have to accomodate that now to preserve the consistency of the scenario! I was seen through!_ Konata thought. _I should have expected Kagami to be this genre-savvy!_

"No! No! Come on! Loosen up!" Misao protested ineffectually. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime fully realistic shared dream experience! You can do anything you want with me and then if you don't like the consequences you can just reset everything and if you like the consequences we can do it again in real life!"

"Are you serious?" Kagami asked by way of goodbye, dragging Konata towards the exit.

"We never get to do what we want together in dreams either…" Misao finished sadly, curling up to cry herself back awake. Around her, the MMA tournament slash spring dance faded away into blackness as the participants were released to pursue more ordinary dreams.

The mood as Konata and Kagami rode the shrine back was somewhat strained.

"You know, there's something seriously wrong with my head." Kagami finally said. "To have a dream about you visiting me in a robe and wizard hat, and then running into Misao at an MMA tournament… and I think she was propositioning me?"

"Oh, but this isn't a dream!" Konata said, again.

"You've been doing a terrible job convincing me of that."

"Oh, but you were having to actively restrain yourself from triggering dozens of flags all at once." Konata accused her. "Clearly you were taking the situation very seriously!"

"_Flags._ You're thinking of this in terms of _flags_." Kagami said in disbelief. "You. You don't know the difference between fiction and reality, do you?"

"Tell me, Kagamin! What is the difference between fiction and reality?" Konata asked with genuine curiosity.

"…" Kagami was speechless for a minute. It was such a basic question she'd never bothered to think about it. "Reality happens whether you like it or not?"

"Fiction exists whether you like it or not too! Hardly anyone is going to like KyoAni spending much of their next season on an upcoming adaptation of the Endless Eight, yet it is still an ordeal that every true fan of Haruhi will have to go through!"

"Yes, you almost roped me into watching that series.."

"Why shouldn't you have watched it! You did read the novels!"

"Exactly. I read it. So I don't exactly need to see it reenacted with bobble-headed cupie dolls and Kyon's voice recorded gratingly over everything… but seriously, you can't tell the difference between reality and fiction?"

"I used to think I could…" Konata said wonderingly. "Now that I'm dead I'm not so sure there's any boundary."

"Okay… how about if you don't like fiction, you can always just not watch it or write your own, better version. And you can't do that with reality."

"Oh, but people are continually writing their own better version of reality!" Konata said, thoroughly enjoying her philosophical mastery over Kagami. "When they can't change things, they always tend to deny them or invent their imaginary worlds and try to live in them.."

"There's still a difference between doing that and reality!"

"But in the first place, you'd be surprised a how much you can change, even things that are supposedly objective and immutable. In the great book of life almost everything has been written in pencil!"

Konata took out a college notebook labeled 'Delusion Note' to illustrate her grand proclamation and opened it up on a random page. Kagami saw a pile of thermodynamic constants, confusing physics explanations of the time arrow (which, incidentally, many theoretical physicists would have murdered to get a glimpse at), prohibitions on time travel. Indeed, it was all written in pencil.

"But really, since it's all in pencil I can write anything! I just need a proper eraser first."

Konata swung half of her skull open, broke away a chunk of her own brain, and proceeded to use it as an eraser on the statement 'time travel is impossible', humming merrily.

Kagami stared at this process with evident disgust.

"If you're trying to convince me that this isn't a guilt dream brought on by my best friend being dead and half her brain being donated to cloning research, you need to stop doing weird and random things like that."

Writing 'time travel is possible' in the notebook distractedly, Konata took a moment to register what Kagami was saying.

"Wait, half of my brain was donated to cloning research?" she said, finally swinging her skull shut and sparing Kagami from the gruesome sight.

"Right." Kagami said. "Don't you remember agreeing to it? Iwasaki Labs has some kind of program where they're trying to solve the demographics crisis by filling understaffed jobs with clones. I'm not sure what they'd want with your brain, though."

"This actually explains something I've been wondering about.." Konata said.

"Honestly, it was in the fine print when you joined Ryoo High. Of course, hardly anyone dies at eighteen, but they still get to collect your brain either way.."

"I really should've paid more attention to stuff like that when I was alive." Konata admitted wearily. "Once this salmon-haired lady at a Gamers shafted me out of a whole 500,000 bonus points on my points card because I missed this loophole in their member's agreement…"

"Right.." Kagami said, automatically tuning out Konata's otaku complaint. "Wiat, did you just write 'time travel is possible' in that notebook?"

"Don't worry, don't worry! It's all metaphorical – what can possibly go wrong?"

The rode on in silence for a few moments as Kagami pondered all of the things that had already gone wrong that day.

"Okay, how about if you really understood the difference between fiction and reality, you would figure out why me and Misao in true love would make, okay, I admit it, a cute and funny story, the kind you always seem to find in doujins, but it completely fails to work in reality?"

"Actually, that's a good point." Konata said despondently after a pause. "Or maybe there's still no difference between reality and fiction, it's just that my storytelling skills need serious practice.. maybe I should have eased you guys into it more… highlighted your previous shared experiences with synchronicities.. kept triggering flags at school… right, but how many flags would I need in that case in total? It's all very uncertain since I haven't played that many dating games where both the player and the NPC are female…"

"Right," Kagami said trying to ignore the fact that Konata was still musing on ways to put her into a lesbian relationship with Misao, "about that. Have you ever actually attempted to tell a story before? You only ever watch stuff. Maybe you should practice writing stories on paper first, _before_ you start messing with your friends?"

"Geez." Konata said. "You don't have to rub it in like that!"

"Hmm…" Kagami said. "Maybe the meaning of this dream is I should practice _for_ you. So I should switch into the lit major and practice writing and then when you visit me I can share what I learned and then it'll be like you're learning all the stuff you never had an opportunity to learn when you were alive…"

"That sounds interesting, but no. I can get my own books on writing if it comes to that."

"Look, I'm grabbing at straws here! This dream is getting to be so long, it would take an army of psychologists six years to explain it all.."

"The thing is, I have other plans for you! But thanks for the suggestion."

Konata was still going to have her moment of revenge on Kagami for not going along with her plans, though.

"Oh, look, there's your house!"

"Wait a minute, Konata; my house is still in the middle of the street. Can't you put it back?"

"Don't worry, Stirling Inferno has been fixed now!" Konata said, producing her magic wand. The cardboard star had been reattached precariously with masking tape.

"That doesn't look very trustworthy… is it really safe?" Kagami doubted.

The question was rendered moot when the mechanisms of motion that had appeared behind the house vanished, along with the cushioned seats on the shrine, Konata's strange cosplay (replaced by a strikingly laid-back sweatshirt and pants), Kagami's ridiculous cosplay (replaced by the clothes she was wearing previously), and Stirling Inferno itself. Instead there was a huge cloud of plaster dust, and the house and shrine were sitting opposite each other in the roadway, the lights inside the house flickering out.

"Ope, time's up." Konata commented calmly.

"It's already 12 pm? What about the house?" Kagami shouted, her hair bristling at the thought of how much it would cost to put the house back and what the roads department would say to the sudden appearance of a house in the middle of their right-of-way. "Please tell me this is going to be put back once I wake?"

"Oh, it gets to stay like that, actually. Won't that be fun when you wake up? Then you won't have the Fifth Wall to worry about since it'll be broken right open!" Konata esplained nastily, hopping down off the shrine.

"Can't you use magic or whatever to fix this?"

"To say the truth, I'm only an ordinary human with access to amazing powers beyond my understanding."

Konata pondered for a minute as Kagami descended into panic.

"Well, there is an incantation you can use to reset everything.."

"Really? Then just use it right now!"

Konata gave her usual cat-like smile at this.

"Well, the thing is, you have to be the one with the intention to fix things. So you have to do it."

"Then tell me right now how to do it! … And it had better not involve kissing you!"

"Well then…" Konata whispered something extremely obscene in Kagami's ear.

"… do I really have to say this?" Kagami complained, blushing.

"Yeah. As loud as you can! If you don't say it, my closed space will collapse onto the default reality and then all of this stuff will be real!" Konata cautioned.

"Okay…" Kagami filled her lungs… and found herself awake, muttering the 'incantation' in a strained voice in full view of Tsukasa.

Tsukasa stared for at least a minute, frozen in shock. Her ears would probably never regain their lost innocence.

Needless to say, it was an awkward moment.

* * *

><p>"You seem to have been neglecting your duties." Takahashi-shacho said heavily, looking out of the fifth floor window of his temporary office.<p>

Usually he would be found in much more opulent surroundings, but the Legendary Girl A task force, by necessity, kept a low profile. He only needed to use the office a couple of times a week, anyways, which made it doubly strange that the desk in the darkened room was buried under the immense pile of papers, the random knickknacks, a chessboard, a Go board, half-empty cups of coffee and the broken, uneaten fortune cookies that were piled disgustingly in the only corner of the table free of other things.

"Since the death of Legendary Girl A, the only story-related influence that has been observed is the unusually-worded fortune cookie promotion at Starbucks. **It doesn't add up!** Story-related influence could only occur in the service of a definite goal, a story, if I may be so bold to say. Is there something you have hesitated to report to me?"

Direct Observation Chief (but really, the only one working in the subdivision she was nominally heading) Takara Miyuki, the other person in the room, simply looked at her feet and kept up her end of the conversation with an awkward nervous silence.

"I happen to know that you've been tiptoeing around the edges of your nondisclosure agreement in your recent conversations with friends."

Great. So he'd been keeping Miyuki herself under surveillance somehow!

"The only reason that you have not been replaced is that, to my regret, your placement within Legendary Girl A's social network makes you irreplaceable. I can't exactly go and hire this Hiiragi girl, for instance, when she is herself a plausible subject of story-related influence, and moreover after what you've told her about our outfit!" his voice suddenly sharp as he finished with an accusation.

Miyuki trembled but stood her ground. She then realized that, instead of being obstinately silent, she could just play the President's game. If the President insisted in talking nonsense at her, she could just talk nonsense back and act surprised when it wasn't the kind of nonsense he'd expected, right?

"Not to mention that your introduction of an unknown variable in terms of exposure of Legendary Girl A to intention-manifestation theory has completely upset my earlier containment plan. Your continuing refusal to provide information completely sabotages the construction of an updated plan, and endangers the objective integrity of this very universe! Haven't I told you that a sufficient number of times?"

She'd have to keep her friends' privacy intact from now on. If only she could nudge his attention away to something else, he might call off whatever other spies he was using.

She somehow doubted this was the sort of things her mother expected her to learn from an experience working at a large corporation..

Miyuki tried to make a start on steering the conversation.

"Actually, I do have one thing which warrants being reported. Contrary to all of the laws of statistics, one of my classmates has recently been receiving and eating large amounts of hermit cookies. I myself was recently startled to find an estranged relative from Vancouver in my driveway one evening perched atop a large shipping container, and under circumstances that I find embarassing to relate in any detail we ended up stuck with the container, which turned out to be full of boxes of hermit cookies. A number of the items were given away to the classmate, but I realized that she was at the nexus of this event, because I have heard that she has since been receiving cookies through inexplicable giveaway promotions at convenience stores, kind neighbors trying out new recipes, a US Air Force supply drop that was somehow sent to mistaken coordinates… these were always specifically hermit cookies, and never any other kind of cookie, which made the sequence of coincidences all the more extraordinary."

"I see… though it still doesn't add up to any coherent story.." he said thoughtfully, and immediately produced a barrage of detailed questions considering her relative from Vancouver, the recipe for hermit cookies, her friends' reaction to Misao's acquisition of said hermit cookies, Misao's reaction to her friends' reaction, news reports about the misdirected supply drop…

Trying to answer as few of the questions as she could under this pressure, Miyuki realized that her half-hearted attempt wasn't working. She needed to take the initiative completely and deflect the conversation to something even more off topic. Let's see, if only she could think of something quickly enough…

"Something has also occurred to me recently." Miyuki barrelled on past the questioning, not quite sure where she'd end up. "Are you quite certain that Legendary Girl A is the only one of her kind? We could be chasing a red herring."

Takahashi-shacho started. Clearly he hadn't ever considered this. He looked pleased with Miyuki for bringing it up, though, and was driven to perform the inadvisable task of starting on a week-old cup of coffee.

"So you are considering the possibility," he said, holding the cup before his lips, "that there may be a Legendary Girl B and a Legendary Girl C, and so on and so forth? But as you could plainly follow in my earlier explanations, our market research has only uncovered one Legendary Girl with the requisite statistical properties."

"But why would Fanfiction Devouring Spirit need to be interested specifically in manga and anime?" Miyuki countered. "As far as I can tell, they didn't have these things in Ancient Egypt. If it appeared in medieval China, it could devour works of Daoist philosophy, causing untold complications in the structure of our universe. If it appeared in ancient Rome, it might start on the works of the decadent poets. If it…"

Takahashi-shacho waved at her to be silent, finally tried to sip his coffee, and nearly choked on the taste. "I understand. But we can't exactly broaden our research department to examine _every single form of information_ that might possibly be consumed anywhere in the world, in order to find statistically average consumers and bait the corresponding Fanfiction Devouring Spirits with painstakingly-constructed information structures, hundreds of man-hours for each individual structure…"

He turned slightly pale.

"What if you're right? If the situation _were_ that serious, we'd be completely doomed. Legendary Girls everywhere and no possibility of intercepting all of them in time.."

Miyuki wondered that she'd managed to stump the President this easily. She supposed that this was further proof that the whole thing was a product of his bizarre paranoia. Probably he'd snapped after a decade of ruthless corporate politics, but was so powerful now that no one dared point out his insanity.

Miyuki certainly wouldn't dare.

But now that she could see straight through him, she could at least push the man around in other ways. She just needed to be quicker at thinking up nonsense than he was.

"But what if it was the other way around?" she asked in a mock-wondering tone.

Takahashi-shacho started again. "_What do you mean?_" he whispered in a barely audible voice.

"What if Legendary Girl A didn't adhere to the whims of the market? How would that work in the first place? It doesn't seem reasonable for me to pretend that she had a market research machine in her brain that could predict how popular a work will be and direct her purchase decisions accordingly…"

"… what if, instead, the market adhered to the whims of Legendary Girl A? The same correlation would be observed either way!" Takahashi-shacho concluded for her.

_Which makes even less sense,_ Miyuki thought privately, _Because that's like saying Konata had direct control over the actions of thousands of people working in the anime industry._

…

They stared at each other briefly, Takahashi-shacho in wonder and Miyuki in unabashed fright at having encouraged further strangeness on his part.

"That notion might open up an avenue of exploration!" he concluded, suddenly like an excited child with a new toy. "This completely revolutionizes my plans!"

On second thoughts, maybe suggesting things to Takahashi-shacho was a bad idea. Even if he was doing something now that would distract him from stalking Konata's "social network", he was likely now to go and invade the lives of a completely different set of people.

Miyuki sighed internally. It was all very worrying. She'd have to stay in this internship for a while; with what she knew about the situation now, to leave would be plainly irresponsible.

"Now **go**," the President announced with an air of finality, "there are important thoughts that I might think regarding this matter! You may consider yourself at ease, until I have contacted you with updated instructions."

* * *

><p>"So the defendant claimed access to enhanced data creation capabilities, but pleaded ignorance of their actual function, saying that they were 'beyond her understanding'." Yuki was musing based on Kagami-sama's earlier story. "This may be problematic in terms of establishing culpability. The other known precedent of unconscious data creation is sitting in this room, and would not have ever been found guilty of unauthorized data manipulation in a court of law. However an assessment may be considered, based on the contrast between <em>obliviousness<em> in the case of the precedent and _wilful ignorance_ in the case of the defendant…"

Haruhi, on the other hand, didn't seem satisfied with the story of how Kagami nearly became a tsunderella.

"How long is this going to take?" she moaned, interrupting Yuki. "This is taking way too long! It's just weird nonsense! So she visited a few people and then mucked about with probability aspects of hermit cookies! And threatened to move someone's house fifty metres to the west using what she pretentiously calls a 'closed space'! This isn't exactly world-shattering, you know."

"Court proceedings do tend to go on for too long." Kyon said. "Maybe you should have considered that fact beforehand."

"… we aren't even close to the part about shooting Hitler!"

"We have just received testimony," Yuki pointed out, "that the defendant took a notebook and wrote 'time travel is possible' in it, allegedly as a jest or illustration. The written assertion, however, may also be construed as an action intended to warp reality, with global repercussions on the entire universe."

"Look." Haruhi said frustratedly. "Time travel was always possible in the first place! It can't be impossible one minute and possible the next! If it was impossible to time travel, then it would be impossible! What I mean is…"

"May I be excused?" Kagami-sama asked, looking bored. "My incarnation _does_ have a homework assignment to do right now. Just call me up again if you need more testimony."

"… no, the stuff that happened during World War I is the most important! The entirety of history was screwed up almost beyond recognition! Moving off to rule a different universe was one of your smarter ideas, Kyon, and now this girl comes along and messes with my stuff!"

Kagami-sama sighed and vanished in a burst of smoke, taking her ordinary aspect with her.

"… that's the second time this is coming up! What's a hitler? How do you shoot it?" Konata protested.

"One second," Haruhi said, "you don't know who Hitler is?"

Konata shook her head.

Haruhi frowned, then pulled out a strange, fluorescent object that looked like a cross between an origami Swiss cheese and a Klein bottle. She frowned further at it. "Get me Mikuru, right now."

Yuki produced a tangled mass of wiring from the pockets of her tuxedo-suit, then fished for a telephone headset to hand to Haruhi.

"Yuki, why are you holding the wires with your mouth? That's unhygienic!" said Haruhi, taking the headset with some trepidation.

Yuki shrugged, removed the wires from her mouth, and spliced two of them together with a startling shower of sparks.

"Payment." she requested obstinately.

"Take it out of the municipal budget later!"

Kyon started. "Does that mean I have to…"

"… yes." Haruhi cut him off. "Hello, Mikuru? Can you tell me why the temporal manifold for my universe looks like it's been gnawed by an army of moths?"

…

"I don't know, you're the one who can solve these things in your head! I have a criminal here who I _think_ is the one responsible, but she doesn't seem to recognize even the most basic stuff from my timeline… all right, you'll go look it up for me, right?"

The self-styled Queen of All Reality took the ensuing pause to grumble about how if this was just some weird bluff by the defendant, she'd get kicked right to the other side of Jupiter. This made Konata sit up a little straighter in her chair.

"Oh, you're back… what do you mean that information would be better off classified? … Mikuru, this isn't the Time Cadets and I'm not a clueless little schoolgirl… Don't tell me what you can and can't trust me with! I'm the one pulling the strings right now! I know you know more about this so **spill it**!"

A frightened whimper could be heard on the other end of the line, followed by a hasty explanation.

"U-uh. So the only thing I understood here is that this is probably the retroactive outcome of a predetermined event?"

Haruhi's eyebrows escaped somewhere into her untidy mass of hair as she made the realization.

"You mean she hasn't committed what we're accusing her of… just yet? Right, thanks," she concluded, hanging up the phone.

"It is necessary to examine further evidence," Yuki offered, "before arriving at that conclusion judicially."

"Forget it," Haruhi sulked, "it's useless to have a trial if we have to release the defendant at the end of it so they end up committing the crimes they were supposed to commit."

"Excuse me." Konata said, finding herself able to stand up and her handcuffs gone. "This is all still very confusing. What exactly am I supposed to shoot?"

"JUST GET OUT OF HERE! Kyon, take her and put her back into some incarnation for me, please."

"Inadvisable." Yuki protested. "We have no guarantee she won't commit additional crimes beyond the ones she's already charged with."

"Fine! I'll supervise the process personally! Happy?" Haruhi next turned to Konata in disgust. "You have until sundown to make whatever preparations you need for spirit guides, then I drag your behind in here and shove you back into physical reality as a new reincarnation. **Understood**?"

Konata nodded uncertainly.

"Good! And be sure not to upset Yuki and do anything _besides_ what you've been charged with already, because," Haruhi grinned predatorily, "I'll be keeping a close eye on you myself!"

* * *

><p>Getting out of the courthouse and hurrying to her castle, Konata was surprised to find it entirely intact, right down to the game of Go still set up in the inner sanctum. With the sun still high in the sky, she considered her options, staring at the board to soothe her nerves and breathing heavily.<p>

First things first. She was still dead for now. And in control of her abilities. And ready for action. Kagami's future as a tsundere ace-attorney-detective was still assured so long as Konata was involved.

Okay, so shipping Kagami that early had definitely been a mistake. Still, if the person Kagami was _meant_ to be with wasn't in the picture yet, a number of things didn't add up… Konata reminded herself to stop thinking about the situation that way. _Anything_ could be decided, Konata didn't have to worry about whether it would add up afterwards… it was just that… yes, Kagami together with Misao had been a strange idea and, in retrospect, it was almost a relief that things hadn't worked out that way.

She'd have to figure out someone to reincarnate as. Physical reality being physical reality, she'd be physically unable to remember who she'd been before, except through vague snatches of subconscious memory, or, if she was _extremely_ lucky, through a strange and supernatural dream induced by occult means she could hardly guess at. Konata wondered briefly at what kind of past lives she'd decided to lock away and not examine when she'd died in the first place, all to avoid losing sight of her present reality.

Haruhi mentioned needing to pick up spirit guides. Well, didn't matter really. The entire castle was full of bored spirits who probably wouldn't mind playing that role. Konata had only one project she wanted to accomplish by incarnating, and didn't know anyone who'd agree to guide her specifically into it, so just about anyone would do at this point. Even as she thought of it, the suggestion was relayed to the rest of the great castle, and a stready trickle of assenting proposals started coming back.

Konata looked sadly at all the books she'd amassed in the strange room. It was quite a nontrivial amount of knowledge (mostly self-contradictory) on how to manipulate reality, which would be lost to her. Odd, though. Supposedly she should have already done everything necessary to fulfil her desires, and now everything was supposed to be moving on its own to the final conclusion. It certainly didn't feel that way right now.

But still, what or when to incarnate as? Supposedly she was still going to accomplish _something_ to get Haruhi mad, even if from the sound of things it wouldn't have anything to do with Kagami.

There was something important the tsundere had mentioned to her offhand.

Right, half her brain was still going to be used intact for cloning research! (So that explained this weird feeling like half her skull was still stuffed away in a pantry somewhere.) If the scientists pulled through on their plan, and didn't mind their clone turning out to be a fully-aware supernatural criminal, this might probably let her cheat almost everything that was restrictive about reincarnation! Incarnating as a fully conscious being while Kagami was still in high school, and having half a brain full of memories to work from would probably take her a long way.

Konata giggled craftily and dropped a stone into place, completing a secure pair of 'eyes'. She was still in the game! Konata congratulated herself, in fact, for having manifested such a convenient coincidence.

The rest of her position was admittedly a shambles, though. Whatever was manipulating the black stones seemed content to weave its own story, gleefully heedless of what Konata was trying to accomplish. She'd have to rebuild her entire strategy just around that one formation.

Not for the last time the thought came into her head – who was she playing against?

She didn't have any time to think about it further. She just needed to go, do _something_, and trust that it would turn out to be the right thing to do.

Because Kagami's future was important to her, and she certainly didn't intend for it to go wrong in this way. She intended for it to go _right_ in ways Kagami had never imagined. It just needed to go a little wrong first. Why had she hesitated at that point? The hesitation was what had almost ruined everything.

She went out into the street and sprinted to the convenient nearby payphone.

"This is the Integrated Data…" Yuki's voice began. It felt a bit weird after having just faced her as the prosecutor in a courtroom.

"Yes! Just connect me to Yuuko or however she's called!" Konata shouted. "You know, the soul-eating demon or whatever."

"Now connecting. Call is within the local zone. Video function enabled."

"Hello?" the voice at the other end of the phone asked.

Konata had a strange moment of second sight at this point. Yuuko was in a brightly lit room, at a table across from a raven-haired older woman in glasses. The woman was only half-paying attention; the other half was buried in a book on the psychology of demons of the seventh circle.

Set up between them was a game of mahjong, using strange, slimy-looking tiles of dark stone, emblazed with patterns that Konata hadn't seen before in any other game of mahjong… the markings seemed to depict strange creatures, unusual and ill-omened numbers placed into unhealthy and sinister relation and vague, half-whispered suggestions of an eldritch underwater…

"AARGH!" Konata shouted. "I don't need to be distracted by Lovecraftian mahjong tiles!"

"What do you want?" Yuuko asked, turning around. There were at least three sticks of Pocky sticking out of her mouth.

"Look, you were insisting on me eating your soul, is that offer still good?"

The raven-haired woman studiously ignored the conversation, instead proceeding to examine the patterns on the mahjong tiles with detached interest.

"Depends." Yuuko's eyes narrowed. "I thought you were arrested by the SOS Brigade or something?"

"… can I change it to just bossing you around and making your life miserable?" Konata asked politely.

"Not particularly interested." Yuuko answered.

"It's not a big deal! For starters, I wanted to make some changes in a friend's life but it didn't work to do it indirectly. Can you incarnate in the nearby reality and make some necessary adjustments for me?"

"WHAT!" Mio shouted coming into the door, laden with groceries.

"I kept telling Yuuko," the raven-haired woman announced acerbically to no one in particular, "that if she keeps picking up basket cases faster than I can cure her of them, I'm taking the subsequent treatment right out of her karma. Look where she's at now."

"Look!" Mio shouted, turning to face Konata. "Whatever you're doing with Yuuko, forget it! She's not fit for real life! You'll set her treatment schedule back for centuries!"

"Never mind!" Yuuko shouted suddenly. "I want to do it! Sounds fun!"

"Okay.." Konata said with a hint of worry in her voice.

"**YOOOOUUUUUUU!**" Mio grew significantly taller, tendrils of chaotic energy lashing out around her, more frightening than Yuuko had been at any point. "Don't make _me_ eat your soul or anything I'll regret! It'll be my first and last time and I'll enjoy every last bit of it!"

The anger enveloping her whipped out and flung Konata into a nearby wall.

"You people are irredeemably !#$ed up." the raven-haired woman delivered her diagnosis quietly, snapping her book shut and getting up to leave.

"Look, can I reason with you on this?" Konata asked the frightening apparition that Mio had become. "I can try to make this situation work out for you people, too!"

"All right." Mio said wearily, calming down. "I suppose we should talk this over like civilized beings. I know it's completely symbolic, but do you want to join us for some dinner?"

Konata opened her mouth to protest that she was still at the other end of town, except she clearly wasn't, so she just sank into a nearby chair. _Telephones in the real world aren't nearly so confusing,_ she thought to herself.

* * *

><p>"Ready?" Haruhi was asking a few hours later, wearing her best diabolical grin as she pointed Konata towards the Curtain of Memories. "I customized it just for this occasion."<p>

The Curtain of Memories seemed to be a huge curtain of eternally moving sawtoothed tendrils, which seemed more likely to grind the unwary traveler into tiny pieces, rather than wiping their mind clear in preparation for a fresh start on life.

"So this means all of my memories of the past life will be inaccessible?"

"Yep!" Haruhi confirmed.

"So I get to choose where and when I incarnate?"

"Sure you don't want to take it from the top?" Haruhi asked sarcastically. "Amoeba, then housefly, then world-wrecking multidimensional criminal? You, know, baby steps in terms of consciousness?"

"Oh, I know who I'm going to incarnate as." Konata said confidently and walked towards the curtain, less confidently.

She took one last glimpse at the sign denouncing Pope Urban X, and realized that she wished she'd taken a bit more time to explore the afterlife.

Just as she approached the teeth and it seemed like things were about to get significantly painful, she woke up from everything as though from a bad and easily forgotten dream.

Her last coherent thought was, _wait, didn't Kagami mention that I need serious work on my storytelling skills? Crap, I completely forgot about that_.

* * *

><p>"Number Two is showing abnormal brainwave activity. That's the one we put the original hemisphere into, to avoid the possibility of a Number One turning out to have difficulties with tissue rejection or anything of the sort."<p>

Iwasaki-san had been called over to the machine at this point for her expert opinion.

"Brain must have gotten pickled in transit." Iwasaki-san joked wearily. What, did they expect her to diagnose the situation just by looking at it?

"It's likely to get worse so long as she's in the sac. The knowledge imprint is 97% complete, though; she should be able to finish the rest through ordinary means. Should we wake her a bit early and just give her serial #1?" Minami asked.

"I wouldn't know." Iwasaki-san responded. "She'll be your younger sister, won't she, Minami-chan? I'm just the one with tens of millions of yen of funding at stake here."

The several consecutive all-nighters observing the clones' gestation had obviously gotten to her.

Minami looked in puzzlement at the five identical clones in the gestation sacs.

The particular machine that monitored Number Two's learning and brain activity continued to beep insistently.

Minami waved her arms undecidedly and swore in a fashion not befitting a clone or a schoolgirl. Genetically adjusted physiology or not, the all-nighters were getting to her as well. "Let's just wake her, then."

Iwasaki-san nodded in confirmation as Minami made a few adjustments to the consoles in front of Number Two. After a brief interval of whirring, the blue-haired figure in the sac was imprinted with the knowledge that she was Number One in what was to be a long series of clones.

Iwasaki-san's shorter, olive-haired clone proceeded to make a commanding gesture. Seven technicians busied themselves wordlessly, fetching a gurney, disabling and disconnecting machinery, and holding the edges of the sac so that Minami wouldn't get a faceful of amniotic fluid when she opened it.

Minami obtained a clean scalpel and sliced the plastic sac open in a practiced, diagonal motion.

Having got the clone out of the sac (with some difficulty caused by the wet, abnormally long hair), onto the gurney, and into a hospital gown with the aid of the technicians, Minami proceeded to run a battery of tests. Eyesight, hand-eye coordination, verbal comprehension.

"Can you hear and understand me?"

"Sure can!"

Minami blinked and nodded. This particular mannerism was not in the standard social protocol that clones were neurally dubbed with. This was a good sign; unlike the pessimistic predictions, the overdubbing procedure that gave clones the ability to function physically and socially immediately on being removed from a gestation sac hadn't removed any significant access to the creative capacities present in the clone's right brain.

"… okay. We have a Number One at least. Sleep! Finally, I can go and sleep!" Iwasaki-san shouted happily. "Minami, just keep working with her from here on, won't you? Wake me if anything goes _catastrophically_ wrong."

"Uh…" Minami raised a hand uncertainly as her 'mother' left the room. She would have cried at this point if her hormonal balance hadn't been tweaked to prevent such embarrassing situations. Regardless, she still felt miserable.

She'd been hoping this milestone in the program would be a good point to tentatively bring up her desire to transfer to the Fukushima Nuclear Syndrome study division.

Regardless, it was time for the purely ceremonial part. A small amount of random cultural data was present in each clone's dubbing. Iwasaki-san had felt that, since each clone series wouldn't be able to express much individuality in any other fashion, the first member to awaken should at least have the dignity of picking a name for themselves – and, incidentally, for every clone to follow in the series.

"State your sequence number and preferred series appellation."

"Daiichi Konata!"

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Notes:<strong> There. I told you Konata would get better. And I can't think of a more presumptuous thing for Haruhi to style herself than "Queen of All Reality". As for macroscopic parameters of reality, 'warmth' is that thing that comes in the box with My Neighbour Totoro (anyone who can suggest a better name for it gets an imaginary brownie), 'splatter' is explained at some point in Admiral-Tigerclaw's fanfic "Sleeping with the Girls", and 'lemon' should require no comment.

How many cookies can Misao eat without suffering adverse effects? Given that the US Air Force is allegedly involved in the delivery process now, the answer could only be 'a lot'.

God, this fic is complicated to write. I'm not going to embarass myself with any further schedule estimates, because even with two chapters left in the season, somehow I can never manage to pin down where a chapter wants to go.

Next time (whenever that turns out to be) look forward to the unexpected, 'in which Miyuki meets the Dentist from Hell'!


End file.
